Editorial
Journalism archives in Switzerland (re)sound with echoes of Southern African liberation struggles. There are echoes of major political events, such as the Geneva Conference of 1976, the unsuccessful initiative by United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to end the Rhodesian civil war. In Lausanne, the Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) Archives contain over four hours of audio-visual recordings from the conference’s opening day. We see delegates arriving at the venue, waiting for procedures to start, and engaging in small talk or preparatory discussions. Short statements directly made into the journalists’ microphones, indistinct talk among delegates and camera shutters provide a glimpse into the atmosphere and activities of the day. There are further reverberations of the Geneva Conference in Basel, in the Ruth Weiss Sound Archives. This comprises the personal collections of journalist Ruth Weiss that she deposited at the Basler Afrika Bibliographien (BAB) Archives. Here, we can listen to recordings of press conferences by Robert Mugabe and Ian Smith, interviews with Ndabaningi Sithole and Bishop Abel Muzorewa, as well as the background noises of hotel lobbies and delegates singing liberation songs.
Then there are echoes of everyday life and work that were intertwined with the freedom struggle. For example, in the 1974 documentary film Rhodésie: l’autre vérité, kept in the RTS Archives, African men and women speak about living under racist white rule. The interviews alternate with images and sounds of them commuting on public transport, working on construction sites in Salisbury, or singing songs while tending to the soil in the Tribal Trust Lands (TTL) of Mhondoro – the infertile areas to which Africans who had been dispossessed of their land were resettled. The Ruth Weiss collection is also full of women’s voices. They talk about how, growing up in the settler societies of Namibia, South Africa or Southern Rhodesia, they became politically conscious, decided to join the liberation movements, and how the struggle for freedom from colonialism and apartheid intersected with the struggle for gender equality.
The echoes of Southern African liberation struggles kept in Swiss journalism archives consist of hundreds of hours of audio and audio-visual recordings that are not widely known in Southern Africa – the region to whom the recordings matter the most. I doubt they are widely known anywhere else. Radio journalists generally produce hours of recordings of which only a few minutes end up being broadcast. Much material is thrown away and, even when archived, is seldom consulted as a historical source. This has partly to do with historians’ preference for texts and images over the medium of sound.
One of the key motivations of the research project “Echoes of Southern African independence in Swiss journalism archives,” conducted at the University of Lausanne from February to July 2024, was to raise awareness about the existence of these echoes of Southern African liberation struggles in Swiss journalism archives. Although located far from their source, in their digitised form, they can easily be accessed remotely. The project brought together researchers, journalists and artists from Southern Africa and Switzerland to explore the sounds, interviews, music and noises recorded during the Southern African independence era in Swiss journalism archives. We approached the archival sound recordings as echoes of the moments they were originally recorded. Listening to them, we focused on what they revealed about the past and what stories could be told with them that made sense in the present moment.
We present the project’s findings in two forms: a podcast, and a composition in the form of a graphic score. At the centre of each podcast episode is a mixtape. For the mixtapes, Lynsey Chutel, Talya Lubinsky, Niren Tolsi, Belinda Zhawi and Percy Zvomuya, in collaboration with Andrei van Wyk, re-arranged archival recordings with sounds from personal collections and newly created ones. Each podcast episode also includes a conversation with the featured collaborator. The collaborators also wrote the texts included here in this publication, which further contextualise their mixtapes. The graphic score, developed by Cara Stacey, Talya Lubinsky and Melanie Boehi, is inspired by the podcast and offers another layer of interpretation to the echoes (re)sounding from the archives and mixtapes.
- Melanie Boehi
