1: Introduction
By Melanie Boehi
Echoes of Southern African liberation struggles is a podcast that explores sounds, interviews, music and even noises recorded during the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives. Over five episodes, journalists, artists and researchers present mixtapes that reconsider archival recordings and reflect on their meanings in the present moment.
In the first episode, I will give you an overview of the research project “Echoes of the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives” of which this podcast is a part of. I will also introduce you to my collaborators and the archives with which we’ve been working.
What do we hear when we listen to echoes of the Southern African independence era kept in Swiss journalism archives? What do these echoes reveal about the past? And how can we rearrange these echoes to tell stories that help us navigate the present moment and reimagine the future?
My name is Melanie Boehi. I’m a historian based at the University of Lausanne. The Echoes of Southern African liberation struggles podcast is part of a research project with the title “Echoes of the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives", which was convened at the University of Lausanne from February to July, 2024. The aim of this project is to explore how to do history differently in a way that is collaborative, interactive, and responsive to post-colonial challenges.
I partly initiated this project because I was often frustrated with how academic historians in Switzerland conventionally conduct research. We study texts, write texts, and publish texts primarily with a public of other academics in mind. We think of mediation mostly in terms of outreach and spend more time competing with each other instead of collaborating. Then there are also post-colonial issues at play. The Swiss journalism archives I studied over the last couple of years keep many resources that are insightful for studying Southern African history. However, people in Southern Africa can’t easily access them. Although it can happen that archivists act as gatekeepers, the main reason this is is not so much a conscious exclusion as the fact that these archives are not well known. Yet, thanks to digitisation, it is possible to access these archives remotely.
I initiated the research project on echoes of the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives with four aims: Firstly, to promote the use of sound archives as resources for historical research. Secondly, to raise awareness about the potential of Swiss journalism archives for studying Southern African history. Thirdly, to show that academic research benefits from collaborative approaches, especially those that combine historical and artistic methods and include researchers from the countries where the archival recordings were made. The last reason was that I wanted to spark a discussion about the mediation of historical research. Can research be made more effective if we don’t treat mediation as the final stage of a linear process, but instead integrate it into a research project from the beginning?
Over the last couple of months, I have reflected on these issues together with a team of brilliant researchers, journalists and artists from Southern Africa. These are sound artists and musician, Andrei van Wyk, journalists Lynsey Chutel, Niren Tolsi and Percy Zvomuya, poet, sound artist and educator Belinda Zhawi and artist Talya Lubinsky. For the following podcast episodes, Lynsey, Niren, Percy, Belinda and Talya each developed a mixtape with archival recordings. Throughout the process, Andrei advised us with his profound knowledge of sound theory and practises, and he also produced the episodes.
Each podcast episode contains a mixtape and a conversation in which collaborators share insights into their work and reflect on the process of making the mixtapes. I sometimes conducted these interviews by myself, sometimes together with other collaborators.
In the course of the project, we conducted research in two archives: the archives of RTS - Radio Télévision Suisse, in Lausanne, and the Ruth Weis Sound Archives kept at the BAB - Basel Afrika Bibliographien, in Basel. Let me tell you a bit more about these two archives.
RTS is the French language Swiss public broadcaster. Its archive contains audio and audio-visual recordings made by correspondents in Southern Africa, as well as by reporters who covered events connected to Southern African politics that took place in Switzerland. One recording I have been particularly fascinated by is footage made on the opening day of the Geneva Conference in 1976. The Geneva Conference was an initiative by United States Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to bring the Rhodesian Civil War to an end. The cameras captured delegates arriving at the meeting venue, sitting down and waiting for the procedures to start. We can’t hear people’s voices, but we can observe their body language as they engage in small talk or preparatory discussions. Watching the footage, one gets a sense of the excitement, anticipation and hopes that must have filled the room. Of course, with hindsight, we know that the conference failed and the bloody war for independence continued for another three years.
The second archive we focused on is the Ruth Weiss Sound Archives. This is a personal collection of Ruth Weiss, which she created in the context of her work as a journalist and writer reporting about Southern Africa during the Independence era. In fact, when we prepared the mixtapes, we focused mainly on this collection as it is an exceptional resource for Southern African history. This has as much to do with the work itself as the remarkable life of its creator, so let me give you an overview of her biography.
Ruth was born Ruth Löwenthal in 1924 into a Jewish family in Fürth in Germany. In 1936, she fled Nazi Germany for South Africa where her family settled in Mayfair in Johannesburg. Arriving in South Africa as an 11-year-old, she realised quickly that the racial segregation in South Africa resembled the antisemitism she had experienced in Germany. This experience made her a lifelong opponent to all forms of racism.
Ruth did well at school and wanted to study law, but she couldn’t afford full-time studies. Instead, she began to work: first at a law firm, then at a bookshop, and then for an accident insurance company. There she quickly rose through the ranks to become company secretary, meaning that she was in charge of the daily business and represented the company internationally. This was highly unusual for a woman at the time as the South African insurance sector was dominated by white men. In 1960, in reaction to a racist incident in the office, she resigned from her insurance job and became a business and economics journalist.
Ruth had been introduced to journalism by her partner, Hans Weiss. In 1950, Hans, who was also a German Jewish refugee living in Johannesburg, began to work as a correspondent for German newspapers. Ruth wrote his articles on business and economics as she was an expert in the field. She also did some international reporting trips for him, which allowed her to travel on the African continent. Hans suffered from bipolar disorder and when he became increasingly incapacitated, she took over more of his work. Her articles were published under his name or his pseudonym, John Merlan. This arrangement only came to an end when they separated in the early 1960s.
Ruth’s first journalism job was with Newscheck in Johannesburg, and from there she moved to the Financial Mail. In 1965, the Financial Mail sent her on a reporting trip to Germany. During this trip, the South African authorities informed her that she was not allowed to return to live in the country anymore. Pregnant with her son Alexander at the time, she stayed in Europe for a couple of months and gave birth to him in London. In 1966, when Alexander was a few months old, she moved to Salisbury as the Financial Mail’s Rhodesia correspondent. The relationship with Alexander’s father ended shortly after her move and she since raised him on her own. After two years, the Rhodesian authorities expelled her because of her critical reporting on sanctions-busting. She went on to work for The Guardian and the Investors Chronicle in London in the early 1970s. She moved to live in Lusaka in Zambia, then led by Kenneth Kaunda, and worked for the Times of Zambia, as well as a correspondent for the Financial Times and other international media organisations. From 1975 to 78, she worked in Cologne as editor of the Africa English language programme of the German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle. From there, she moved back to London to work as a freelance journalist. In 1982, she moved to Harare to work in journalism education, and in 87 became a facilitator for the Zimbabwe Institute for Southern Africa, a secret to facilitate meetings between white and black South Africans, which was funded by Switzerland.
Ruth’s second career trajectory as a journalist, was as unlikely as her foray into the male dominated insurance sector. At the time when she became a journalist, there were few women journalists working in Southern Africa and even fewer women covering business and economics. She mostly got along well with male colleagues. However, at Deutsche Welle, she was confronted with jealousy and what we would today call bullying by male colleagues. What she often struggled with was combining her work as a journalist with being a single mother. In her autobiography, she writes about spending hours every day commuting between her office at The Guardian and her home: “It was impossible for me to be a Fleet Street journalist at the same time as being a mother and housekeeper.”[Ruth Weiss, A Path Through Hard Gras (Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2014), p. 201]. In fact, many of her job moves were motivated by trying to find a better balance between work and looking after her son.
In 1992, Ruth semi-retired and moved to the Isle of Wight. However, she continued to write journalistic articles, mainly for the Swiss weekly Die Wochenzeitung. She also wrote numerous books, including several versions of her autobiography, non-fiction books on politics and novels concerned with Jewish and Southern African history. She frequently went on reading tours to schools across Germany to talk about her books and her life, and she became well known as an anti-racism educator in the country. In the 2000s, she moved back to Germany, and a few years ago she moved to Denmark, where she now lives with her son’s family.
Despite her many moves and quite miraculously, Ruth kept an archive of manuscripts, correspondence, press material and audio recordings related to her work that she gave to the Basler Afrika Bibliographien to make it accessible to researchers. The Ruth Weis Sound Archives, which we worked with for this podcast, consist of 182 audio tapes, which altogether run over 122 hours. The majority of the tapes are from the 1970s and 80s and contain interviews and press conferences. These recordings provide insights into the moments of recording, the recorded events themselves, but also how Ruth worked as a journalist and the relationships between interviewer and interviewees.
In figuring out how to approach these recordings, I have been inspired by Anette Hoffmann’s book, Listening to Colonial History [Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2023]. Anette Hoffmann suggests approaching sound collections as echoes. One trait of echoes is that they are always heard over a distance and with a delay, they are distorted and filled with gaps of meaning. Hoffmann also suggests a strategy of “close listening”, which means first of all, actual listening to the recordings and not just reading transcripts, with a focus on everything that is audible: words, but also non-verbal expressions and background noises, which provide insights into the recording moments. Importantly, it also means listening collectively with people who understand the language and the context.
Intending to bring archival recordings from various collections together and connecting them to the present moment in Southern Africa, I thought the format of the mixtape might work well. The initial brief I gave to the collaborators for each episode was to select recordings from the two archives and mix and re-arranged them in a way that made sense to them.
As weeks went by, we kept meeting online, sending around material, and jamming with the archival recordings. People also added recordings from their personal collections or their own voices to the mixtapes. As a result, we have five highly interesting and very different mixtapes that explore themes like time, violence, spirituality, independence, and women’s struggles. They invite us to listen for echoes that connect South and Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, and hold the past, present, and future together.
Outro
The Echoes of Southern African liberation struggles podcast was developed by Melanie Boehi, in collaboration with Andrei van Wyk, Lynsey Chutel, Talya Lubinsky, Niren Tolsi, Belinda Zhawi and Percy Zvomuya. Sound design, editing and production is by Andrei van Wyk. Original archival recordings used in the mixtapes are subject to the regulations of the Basler Afrika Bibliographien Archives. The project “Echoes of the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives” was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation with a Spark grant. Thanks go to Ruth Weiss, Maggie Caroline Katsande, the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, Radio Télévision Suisse, the University of Lausanne, the Swiss National Science Foundation and all contributors. For more information on the project, please check out our website: independence-echoes.org.
