The Hoffmann Project of Cultural Knowledge launched at the University of Pretoria
The Hoffmann Project of Cultural Knowledge, engaging the archive of German colonial missionary ethnographer Carl Hoffmann, was launched at the University of Pretoria on 5 August. Guest speaker at the launch was APC Research Associate Professor John Wright.
The Hoffmann Project of Cultural Knowledge, engaging the archive of German colonial missionary ethnographer Carl Hoffmann, was launched at the University of Pretoria on 5 August, 2015. APC researchers previously attended a preparatory conference for the publication and maintain an interest in this project which has significant parallels to and differences from aspects of APC work. Guest speaker at the launch was APC Research Associate Professor John Wright.
The project has three components:
1) A book - Ethnography from the Mission Field: the Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge, Leiden: Brill, 2015, edited by Annekie Joubert (Humboldt University, Berlin), Gerrie Grobler (formerly University of South Africa, Pretoria), Inge Kosch (University of South Africa, Pretoria), and Lize Kriel (University of Pretoria).
2) A film - A Journey into the Life of a Mission Ethnographer, made by Annekie Joubert, Katarzyna Biernacka, and Jörg Schulze.
3) A digital database - Hoffman Collection of Cultural Knowledge, made by Annekie Joubert and Katarzyna Biernacka.
John Wright gives his impressions of the book, based on a close reading of the editorial matter in it, and a skim-reading of sections of the text:
The book, Ethnography from the Mission Field: the Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge, puts in front of the reader 24 texts, totalling some 550 pages in their original published form, which deal with the historical culture of people broadly referred to in the book as Northern Sotho. These texts were originally produced by Berlin missionary Carl Hoffmann (1868-1962) and his African interlocutors, and published in both Northern Sotho and German across a 45-year period, from 1913 to 1958.
They appeared in the leading German Africanist journal of the time, published by the School of African Studies at the University of Hamburg. It was first called Zeitschrift für Kolonialsprachen, then, from 1927, Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen-Sprachen, and then, after World War II, Afrika und Űbersee. The name changes signal major shifts in the German intellectual milieu with which Hoffmann maintained contact from South Africa during his long life.
The 24 texts have now been republished in Northern Sotho in a modernized orthography, and with an English translation in place of the original German. With the addition of copious annotations, the texts have now expanded to 950 or so pages, accompanied by some 210 pages of editorial matter, illustrations, and indexes.
Even after an acquaintance of only a few days with the book, it was clear to me that it makes a major contribution to historical scholarship in South Africa, particularly to the study of the history and cultures of African societies in what is now Limpopo province. Other readers will see it as making an important contribution to mission history in this country. It will no doubt find its place in a number of different historiographic lineages.
My own interest in it is shaped by my experience as co-editor of The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples (University of Natal Press and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 6 vols. 1976-2014, in progress). As a co-worker in the field of editing historical source books, I have already found this an exciting book to grapple with, to read into, to think about, to go back to, to agree with, and to disagree with. The comments that follow are not intended as criticisms but as first-impression heads for possible future discussion.
Ethnography from the Mission Field presents to us bodies of cultural and historical knowledge produced in a series of ethnographic presents: 1913-16, 1928-34, 1937-8, and 1956-8. I felt that the editors needed to have done more by way of specific contextualising of each phase over this long period. By the same token, I felt that they should have done more to discuss Hoffmann’s shifting motivations in working on this publishing project through nearly half a century of deep-seated political and social changes, both in South Africa and in the Europe where he grew up. And – still in the same vein – I would have liked comment on how far scholars can trace changes, however slight, in both Northern Sotho and in German over the period of publication.
We are told at several points in the book that the Northern Sotho texts were “co-produced” by Hoffmann and his African assistants. But it is not always clear what precisely this meant at any particular point. We can assume that there must have been changes in Hoffmann’s working methods over the 45 years in which the articles were published. Hoffmann himself frequently wrote about his assistants in his various publications (see the discussion of “Hoffmann’s Interlocutors” by Lize Kriel on pp. 45-53 of the book); I would have liked more discussion, where possible, of their actual involvement in the production of the texts.
This point speaks directly to a major issue in discussion of the sources of the history of African societies. From certain Africanist perspectives, “colonial” sources produced by white people are inescapably tainted and should be avoided in favour of “authentic” African sources produced by black people. From a postcolonial perspective, there are no separate lineages of white and black sources: they have been entangled since the very first contacts between colonisers and colonised. It would have been instructive to have had more detailed discussion in the book from this perspective of the relationships between Hoffmann and his interlocutors.
A crucial point that users will need to take on board is that in this book, neither the original Northern Sotho texts nor the original German texts are made available to us. The original Northern Sotho has been rendered into modern orthography, which makes it much more accessible to Northern Sotho-speakers today, but in the process something has become lost to the student of language and of history. And the original German texts have been replaced by modern English translations, which make the texts accessible for the first time to those English-speaking readers, probably a majority, who do not read German. Again, something gained, something lost. The main point is that the texts in the book are different from those in the original publications. Ideally, the active researcher would need to work with both sets.
I was pleased to learn from the book itself and from conversation with the editors that they faced problems in the production of the English translations which appear in the book. Translation between any two languages is never a straightforward process; in this case the problems of establishing meaning as precisely as possible were compounded by the fact that translators were working in three languages. The editors wisely decided to take the original Northern Sotho texts as the ur-texts and to work them into English, with reference to Hoffmann’s German translation as they went along, and with annotations to mark passages where they disagreed with his renderings.
Three of the editors (Joubert, Grobler and Kosch) are scholars of African languages, while the fourth (Kriel) is a historian. This weighting was no doubt a great advantage in the business of translation. It was probably less of an advantage in the business of annotating the texts (to a total of nearly 3500 footnotes), where the editors seem to have been more at home with issues of language and ethnography than of history.
Kriel the historian comes into her own in writing the long (60 pages), probing, and conceptually informed “Historical contextualisation” of Hoffmann’s life and work. The perspective that she takes is perhaps best illustrated in a passage at the very end of her essay where, drawing on the work of Isabel Hofmeyr, she talks about an important shift that has recently taken place among scholars in ways of assessing ethnographic sources. From an anthropological gaze which looks for “facts”, the move has been to an aesthetic contemplation of the nature of story-telling. This allows us to appreciate something of the ways in which Hoffman’s interlocutors were not simply conveying to him “information” about culture and history, but were articulating a politically informed consciousness shaped by the contexts in which they lived their lives.
Towards the end of the book appears an essay by Inge Kosch on “Orthographic developments and grammatical observations”. It deals in detail with the history of changes in the orthography of Northern Sotho since it began its life as a written language in the later nineteenth century. The essay is highly technical and difficult for a non-Northern Sotho speaker to follow, but producing it was clearly a labour of love on the part of the author, and, for this historian, at least, it stands as a powerful example of the kind of detailed historical treatment that this esoteric and largely neglected subject needs.
Every edited source book will have its own particular characteristics. Researchers need to study the editorial framing in detail before they head for the texts themselves. For its part, the Hoffman book does not just present a body of inert texts waiting to be plundered for “facts” by the researcher; it is a book which requires the researcher to work with it, to engage with it intellectually. It opens up numbers of different avenues for active scholarly discussion. And this is only the beginning of the process.