Research Visit by Dr Anette Hoffmann

In November 2016, the APC received funding from UCT’s University Research Committee for a visit to UCT by APC Honorary Research Fellow, Dr Anette Hoffmann. Hoffmann presented the chapter “‘Nobody will want to join the next war’: the intricate traces of Mohammed Nour’s presence in Germany, 1910–1922”, which is part of the monograph on the recordings of the Berlin Lautarchiv that she began during her time as a senior researcher with the APC.

Her latest research is on the extraordinarily rich archival traces of the Somalian prisoner of war, Nour, who was recorded in a German camp. Hoffmann re-assembles the traces of his presence so as to unlock archival segregation and to show how Nour became a racialised object of scientific and artistic curiosity before and during World War I. The recent translation of his voice recordings by the Swedish-Somalian scholar, Bodari Warsame, together with Nour’s life story in a grammar of Somali, unwrap fragments of a local political debate of the early 20th century. The presence of these fragments of African historiology in a collection of recordings demonstrate the significance of research on historical sound archives for a larger discussion on politics of representation, colonial historiographies, and practices of colonial linguistics.

A highlight of Hoffmann’s visit was her “conversation” with a group of young, critical linguists, organized by sociolinguist, Ana Deumert, of the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics at UCT. The conversation took Hoffmann’s research on colonial linguistics, and especially the connection between German Afrikanists of the first generation and South African scholars of that time, as a starting point to think about the troubling history of the discipline and potential modes of decolonisation. The group has decided to form a network for further exchange on these topics.