“Let Me Come to Tell You”: Rethinking Gender, Colonialism, and Narratives of Modernity from the Northern Namibian Sound Archive

Abstract

This contribution to the special issue develops an argument about time and gender in African history in relation to historical sound recordings. Revisiting a case study from the Namibian sound archive I demonstrate innovative methodological strategies that open up new avenues of conceptual and theoretical thinking about gender and time in African history. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial ‘Ovamboland’), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated in relation to colonial temporalities. The article presents a historical ethnography of how both the Christian mission’s cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration’s efforts to masculinize the ‘native’ political authority produced a gendered perception of Owambo women during the first half of the 20th century. However, it also demonstrates the performer’s powerful, creative reappropriation of these discourses, which we can gauge by approaching the historical sound archive with a methodological strategy of ‘close listening’. The argument thus extends to a broader reflection on the potential of historical sound recordings for challenging Eurocentric teleological narratives of gender and modernity. It also looks into the inherent limitations, and thus the opportunities and challenges, which the colonial sound archive presents for the development of decolonial methodologies in fields such as historical ethnography, cultural studies, and historiography.

Keywords

• historical sound archive
• Namibia
• gender
• time
• performance