The acoustic trail of Bayume Mohamed Husen

Post-colonial research: An audio recording by Bayume Mohamed Husen stored in the sound archive of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin provides an insight into the colonial entanglements of Berlin’s urban and university history.

Who is speaking here? What was read out and why? What is the cultural significance of what is being said? And what can the voice tell us about the speaker? My research on colonial presences in the Berlin LAUTARCHIV is dedicated to these and other questions. The sound archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU) contains extensive collections of shellac discs that were recorded for scientific purposes until the middle of the 20th century. The recording of Bayume Mohamed Husen is one of the archival holdings of acoustic testimonies of colonised subjects. In order to approach this specific source, I organised a listening workshop at the Institute for European Ethnology at the HU together with the social and cultural anthropologist Jasmin Mahazi. Swahili speakers were invited to discuss the sound recording and what they had heard. By bringing together different expertise, perspectives and listening impressions, the workshop format aimed to encourage a collective and open-ended dialogue with the historical material.

An ambivalent historical source that is difficult to interpret

The voice recording was made in July 1934 at the then newly founded Institute for Sound Research at Berlin University. The recording features a text read by Husen in Swahili about Swahili wedding traditions. The shellac disc was primarily intended for language teaching and was published a year later with corresponding accompanying texts in the publication series of the Sound Library at the Institute for Sound Research. In the language learning booklet, Husen was named as the narrator of the text, although it is not clear who was actually responsible for the content of the recording. More than written, photographic and film sources, acoustic testimonies convey the impression of getting particularly close to people from the past by listening to their individual voices. At the same time, the conditions under which the sound objects in the sound archive were created are all the more difficult to reconstruct. For this reason, the sound recording of Husen is an ambivalent historical source that requires a multi-perspective interpretation.

Biography is closely interwoven with German colonial history

Husen’s audio recording and the accompanying written materials point to colonial power structures that also manifested themselves at Berlin University. As a so-called language assistant, Husen was affected by precarious working conditions. As the speaker of the sound recording, he was degraded to a scientific object. The cultural scientist Britta Lange has described individual holdings of the sound archive as ‘sensitive collections’, as they were created under problematic conditions and the exploitation of clear power relations. In the context of Husen’s archived soundtrack, however, it is not only the recording situation that must be categorised as sensitive, but also the content of the recording, as it describes intimate cultural practices in an inappropriate way and in inappropriate words. A critical and collaborative examination of the recording from the sound archive, which has received little attention to date, can help to identify the sound document as a product of colonial power structures and as an example of the historical entanglement between science and colonialism.

Irene Hilden is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a member of the ‘Minor Cosmopolitanisms’ research training group at the University of Potsdam. She studied Cultural Studies, European Ethnology and German Studies in Berlin and Istanbul. In her doctoral thesis, she is focussing on colonial traces in the Berlin sound archive and investigating the current handling of acoustic heritage.

The workshop was sponsored by the Humboldt-Universitäts-Gesellschaft and the Humboldt Labor.

Organisation: Irene Hilden (HU Berlin), Jasmin Mahazi (FU Berlin) Participants: Rukia Bakari (Leipzig University), Frank Daffa (HU Berlin), Lutz Diegner (HU Berlin), Vitale Kazimoto (Tanzania), Stephanie Lämmert (MPI for Human Development), Asmau Nitardy (German-African Business Association)