For all of us, sound can be many things: a radio show, podcast, background noise, entertaining music…but as a sound practitioner, sound to me is a medium through which we can express what otherwise may be difficult. 

I came to the form of audio documentary through the darkness of the history of Tanzanian heritage in Germany. I heard an absence that only sound could fill, a question that only sound could answer, a horrible ripping apart that only sound could begin to reconnect.

During the period of colonial conquest in Tanzania, German explorers, anthropologists, military officers, and other colonial conspirators collected objects and ancestral human remains both as trophies of domination and as specimens for so-called scientific research. Violence, excavations of graves and military force were commonplace features of these collection campaigns. 

There is no clear roadmap for the restitution and repatriation of Tanzanian relics and ancestral remains that have been stored for over a hundred years. As a result, their presence is largely unknown by many Tanzanians, and debates around heritage, ancestral dislocation and history remain, for the most part, undiscussed. Communities are not aware they have ancestral human remains in Germany and, once informed, they often link local environmental degradation and community breakdown to the curse of an unburied ancestor.  

When I received the opportunity to study ancestral human remains in Göttingen, a small city in Germany, I felt a sense of discomfort, sadness and ultimately duty to engage with this difficult history. 

I wanted to meditate in the grief of this loss. I wanted to honor the gap that these ancestral human remains left and the troubled afterlife they were subject to. I also wanted to capture the sounds of both Germany and Tanzania as a way of archiving and making sense of these localities that are inextricably linked by this grim history. I knew that I wanted to dwell in the gray areas and meditate on the deep loss and grief that this collection has brought. I did not want to capture the stories of these ancestral human remains nor be their ambassadorial voice. I wanted to be in dialogue with them. Even if that conversation was of silence.

How can we form a bridge to connect Tanzanians with this haunting history and heritage of ancestral human remains and German institutions that continue to hold these remains? How can we re-imagine the museum and archive as spaces that can recognize and facilitate healing of the traumatic afterlife of these ancestral human remains and objects? 

Most museums, archives and heritage institutions do not consider these questions let alone allow for these conversations to happen. Many museums aren’t sufficiently accessible. Museums that house this heritage are in European countries, requiring travel and resources that communities of relevance cannot access. Even if they could access them, museums are strange spaces existing mostly as repositories for bygone relics with an overarching aura of voyeurism. Access to the storage rooms and information on the objects and ancestral human remains are often not published as public information. In addition, understanding and healing from this dark history is difficult as the language around the history and future of these objects and remains is mostly academic and conversations occur at senior levels of government and museums. As a result, the Tanzanian public and descendants are left in the dark, unable to access their own heritage and contribute to the debate. 

It also felt wrong to engage this history through the same lens of academia and research that subjected objects and ancestral human remains to scientific inquiry and objectification. I wanted to use a practice that could accommodate the multidimensionality of this history and found that academic writing and research often came off as sterile and did not allow for neither the objects and ancestral human remains to be acknowledged nor the accompanying grief. Academic writing and research is too focused on fact, on pinpointing the chronology of events and ignores the complexity of emotions, particularly grief, loss and the continued trauma of this heritage being stored away in dark rooms.

I found sound to be the most fitting way to document this conversation. When I was recording the environment, the city, the university that the ancestral human remains are in, I was trying to accurately capture the reality that they have been in for over a century. Germany has changed significantly since 1912 and the sound was not able to capture these changes, but it did capture the present, and the silence that exists in both the present and the past. Through this I felt that I was able to be in conversation with this history. Through this silence I may not have been able to understand what they had gone through, but I could sit in it with them. Even if just for that moment. With sound we can find communion in grief, we can endure the unbearable weight of loss together. 

The question of accessibility of course is another factor to consider. In Tanzania, where radio remains a huge platform, developing an audio documentary represents the potential to reach more people than print and text could ever dream of. There is alignment also with oral cultures and audio documentary. In a context where traditions, cultures and histories are stored in oral history, audio documentary becomes the most appropriate form. Against the backdrop of universities and communities separated by rivers of accessibility, funding and language, audio documentary can flit in between worlds and create a new landscape where one can listen and pick what they want and leave what they do not. 

The answer for me, is for audiences to hear the story of these remains in a format that is accessible and illuminating. Audio documentaries can engage with subject matter that is rooted in colonial history without propagating the tradition of scientific racism, research, and emphasis on written sources. By subverting the conventions of academic research and using recorded sound the issues and debates around restitution, stolen heritage and coloniality can include others who may not be within the academic field but have a huge stake. All they need to do is listen.  

In the experimental sound piece I created, “the sun here, is the sun there,” one can hear water dripping in the background, papers rustling, someone clearing their throat. The listener is allowed to sit in on the experience. Audio documentary offers unique and especially intimate forms of witnessing. Listeners are invited to immerse themselves in an environment without moving image, illustration, or suggestions of how to interpret what it is they are experiencing. This is a unique opportunity, especially given our daily realities where we are overloaded with images, notifications, faces, headlines, infographics, music clips and pings. Audio documentary focuses the listener to play their role: to listen. It obliges passivity and surrender. 

This is a useful state for one to be in when encountering contexts of violence, especially when the violence is in a different tense, the past tense, where little can be done to engage the history of violence. Where there is no possibility of undoing the trauma. The blood has been spilt; the flesh has been cut. What else can one do but be a witness? Navigating these legacies of violence requires tactful attention to form and communication. Written methodologies which many in the field of provenance and restitution have been trained to use do not hold well to this history of trauma. In fact, the emphasis on documents, labeling, factual reasoning, and so-called logic feed into the same approach of German Enlightenment thinkers and colonialists of ordering and cataloging the world. Sound is a practice that can show the power of the unspeakable, historical experiences that cannot be expressed in words. It can do scholarship that other forms of scholarship cannot do. It can capture the unspeakable in a form that is itself unspeakable. Leaves rustling in the wind, bus honks in the city, the scraping of a metal chair on the floor. The sounds do not follow a structure. There is no introduction, argument, or conclusion. It is an open-ended experience, one where the listener is invited and encouraged to embrace embodiment. To come to their own conclusions.

During my time as a Sensitive Provenances Research Fellow in Göttingen, I adopted this non-academic approach of sound and creative writing to engage with the collection of ancestral human remains from Tanzania. I was wary of the binaries of restitution and justice, the simple equation of colonialism=wrong, returning the ancestral human remains and objects=right. These arguments follow logical reasoning. However, the ethics of dealing with ancestral human remains and descendant communities does not allow for such simple mathematics. There are multiple implications of these human remains existing in Germany. Most of the ancestral human remains from Tanzania were collected in 1912. Since then, Tanzania has gone through a series of changes, namely independence from colonial rule, the union of Tanganyika mainland and Zanzibar to form Tanzania and the strategic and delicate project of national unity. Many of the human remains are identifiable only by their ethnic group, an anthropological fascination that colonial powers were obsessed with. In present day Tanzania, matters of ethnic identity are handled with precarity to avoid ethnic conflict and large-scale violence. While navigating these challenges of restitution, repatriation and national identity, the ancestral human remains continue to live an afterlife of darkness. Kept in gray boxes in storage rooms of universities and museums. 

One of the most significant challenges of audio documentary creation is of intention. All sounds, no matter how big or small, can be impactful. It is difficult to know which sound to include and which one to leave. But this is an issue that I face as a historian too. What I have found is that not all acts of preservation must have a purpose. And sometimes you may not even know what the purpose is when you record sound. But this is also not the intention of archives. We as historians are tasked with the mission of preservation for the sake of it, for the sake of memory. We do not know what our oral histories, oral moments serve towards, but our future selves may know what to do with them, whether for personal or professional use (the two of which, are often deeply connected). 

Experimental sound can be used to record daily life, moments that may be outside of a recognizable historical arc. I know that the strange sight of a young woman recording a door closing or holding a microphone to the sound of a boat’s engine on water was confusing to people passing by. But I believed that what I was doing was a rejection of the historical and museological tradition. With sound, one is allowed to collect the most mundane and evocative sound and place them along each other. There is no rubric. By contrast, in the museum space order and form is king. Vitrines, polished glass, pillars, text on plaques. History in the museum becomes part of this ordered approach. There is always a reference to the collector who is known by name, birthdate, hometown, and profession. Whereas there are often no names for the ancestral human remains collected from unearthed graves, sickbays or worse still battlefields against colonial conquest. What then to call them? 

We cannot call them by any name. Perhaps our ancestors, wazee wetu, our elders, grandfathers and grandmothers, people that looked like us. The information is limited. Unknown becomes a word one hears again and again when engaging in this field. Sound has the potential to dwell in the grayness of history. Audio documentary practice is deeply vulnerable and thus leaves us tender. We need to be brave in this vulnerability –the harnessing of memory, ancestral connection and family is no small task. It requires us to deal with pain, loss, grief and in some cases deep trauma. But sharing, documenting, is also healing. And I have found that connecting with each other is a form of collective process. Even if in silence.