Venue: Clarke‘s Bookshop, 199 Long Street,
Cape Town 8001
Date and time: Wednesday, 8 March 2023, at 5.30 pm
Programme:
Anette Hoffmann in conversation with Duane Jethro, lecturer at the Department of African Studies and Linguistics, University of Cape Town.
Refreshments will be served and the book will be on sale.

On the book:
European archives hold historical voice recordings that were produced by linguists, ethnologists and musicologists during colonial rule in African countries. While these recordings reverberate with the polyphonic echoes of colonial knowledge production, to date, acoustic collections have rarely been consulted as sources of colonial history. In this book Anette Hoffman engages with a Southern African audio-visual collection, which is located in five different institutions across Vienna, Austria.
Several recordings collected by the anthropologist Rudolf Pöch in August 1908 have been retranslated for this book. These translations provide new insights into Pöch’s collecting expedition to the Kalahari. Pöch’s narrative of his heroic journey is called into question by the Naro speakers’ comments, which address colonial violence and criticise the research practices of the anthropologist. By attending to the spoken texts on the recordings and reconnecting them to photographs, ethnographic objects, archival documentation and Pöch’s travelogue, Hoffmann offers a different reading of this research trip into a war zone.
Anette Hoffmann is a senior researcher at the Institute for African Studies and Egyptology, University of Cologne, currently working on a project on German linguists‘ concepts of language and race in relation to Southern African languages.

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