In November 2023, with the chill of early winter settling over a grey and cold Frankfurt, Karolyne Mendes, Mauro Manhanguele and I boarded a flight to Maputo. As members of the research group “Mutual Dependencies and Normative Production in Africa,” this was our first joint archival trip, and we were excited to dive into the rich possibilities awaiting us in the archives. While Karolyne and Mauro would remain for two months, I had only 25 days before departing for a conference in Accra.
The flight was smooth and, after a stopover in Ethiopia, we arrived in Mozambique. We found a cozy place in a beautiful, tree-lined neighborhood not far from the archive. With Mauro being from Maputo, we were welcomed by warm people and good food from the start. Arriving on a Saturday, we explored the city and took some time to rest before our first visit to the archive on Monday.
On that morning, we woke up early, fueled by a hearty breakfast, and prepared for a long day ahead. Our backpacks were filled with the essentials a historian needs: notepads, pens, masks, gloves, laptops, cameras, cell phones, and snacks, because you never know when you might need them. I packed all of this, along with a recorder that I barely knew how to operate.
Tracing Shadows in Sunlight
In Mozambique, our goal was twofold: to gather written sources for our projects and to conduct interviews that would serve as historical sources. These conversations would be woven into Tramas Coloniais, a documentary podcast we were producing on the history of colonialism and its normativities in Africa. The journey promised to be more than research; it was a chance to explore new ways to produce academic knowledge.
But those who spend considerable time on archive trips abroad know how quickly expectations can fall short of reality. The excitement we felt in the first few days faded at a pace proportional to our growing awareness of the challenge ahead. While each of our research projects approaches the topic differently, we are all focused on exploring human and non-human agencies that often go unrecorded in official archives. In addition to the already challenging task of finding judicial documents, there was the fact that the agents we were interested in were often mentioned but rarely featured prominently in the written sources we found.
In recent decades, there has been extensive discussion in the historiography of colonial law about subaltern agencies and how the relationship between knowledge, law, and power cannot be understood without considering indigenous populations’ knowledge (Yannakakis, 2020; Premo, 2017; Kolapo and Akurang-Parry (Ed.), 2007). These discussions are supported by an already substantial body of anthropological literature on non-human agencies, which shows that not only the so-called “indigenous knowledge”, but every type of knowledge is generated and expanded through more-than-human actions (Latour, 2007; Viveiros de Castro, 2015; Descola, 2014). Studying colonialism, therefore, whether in the American, Asian or African context, always means investigating, beyond the undeniable violence and imposition, stories of multidirectional translations.
Listening to the Silence of the Archives
As the days went by and our progress with the written sources dwindled, we gradually became acquainted with that strange object I had been carrying in my backpack since day one. The recorder soon became our companion in the interviews we managed to schedule, as well as in other spaces that were not, or did not seem to be, directly related to our research. We drove through the ruins of a colonial city, spoke with the king of an island, shared confidences with Mozambicans who came to work in Germany during the 1980’s, and walked through the basement of a building where hundreds of cassette tapes holding the memories and stories of Mozambicans in the post-independence era are disintegrating due to mold and poor preservation conditions. During these recordings, we witnessed and experienced a history of colonial normative knowledge that has yet to be found in official archives.
Throughout our research journey in Mozambique, we quickly learned that doing a history of colonial normative knowledge involves more than simply assuming that this knowledge emerges from multiple translations. It is essential to incorporate oral sources and oral traditions into the narrative. While this may be obvious to scholars in fields like African studies, anthropology, and social history, it appears to be less recognized among legal historians. Thus, it might be useful to reiterate an idea that is already quite well recognized in certain academic traditions: embracing orality is not only about giving voice to the subaltern or making them speak. Such a perspective can come across as pretentious and sometimes even misguided. Instead, this is fundamentally a methodological concern.
To write a history of colonialism and its normativities in Africa that genuinely seeks to understand and highlight the agency of Africans and their forms of knowledge production, it is crucial to go beyond written sources. While written texts can occasionally shed light on the expectations, practices, and narratives of so-called subaltern agents, they are ultimately insufficient. Writing was (and is!) neither the sole means of knowledge production nor a primary or relevant method for documenting and conveying meanings in many African societies.
When Stories Speak: Breathing Life into Tramas Coloniais
These reflections sparked the creation of Tramas Coloniais, the documentary podcast that I mentioned earlier and now wish to elaborate on. With seven episodes covering distinct normative aspects of colonialism in Africa, this project is not only a platform for collective research but also an assemblage of the topics, sources, and theoretical debates that our research group has delved into in the last few years. Presented in Portuguese, Tramas Coloniais aims to challenge the primacy of written text in academia, inviting listeners to engage with the narratives we present. For those curious about our production process, the podcast’s website features valuable information for teaching, including source materials and the bibliographic references we have utilized.
Our research experiences in Mozambique — the successes and failures, the reflections, questions, and anxieties, the interviews, and also the content of the written sources we managed to collect during that time — come through across all episodes. We have also included recordings and reflections from Namibia and Ghana, where I traveled for conferences and research, and Nigeria, where Fernanda Thomaz, who helped us come up with the idea for this podcast, completed a postdoc in 2022. And yes, the word “experiences” is intentional here, because one of the big advantages of the audio format is that it lets listeners dive into the messy process of knowledge production. It is not just about sharing and passing on historical facts; it is about exploring new ways to connect researchers, sources, and listeners.
In various academic circles, the significance of oral history and traditions in the colonial landscape of Africa has long been recognized (Vansina, 1985; Hoffmann, 2023). However, there’s a tendency to relegate these rich oral narratives to the printed page, with interviews often transcribed and tucked away in books, chapters, and scholarly articles. When audio versions do make an appearance, they’re usually relegated to footnotes or bibliographies, offering little more than an afterthought. This reliance on written text, while intellectually rigorous, can inadvertently dilute the vibrancy of these stories, silencing their subtleties and limiting their accessibility. Ultimately, this format risks entrenching epistemological imbalances and methodological constraints, leaving the power of these narratives in the shadows.
The podcast therefore took shape as something of an experiment. The thinking was that when knowledge gets communicated beyond the written word, the narratives around colonial law can evolve, broadening how we understand the field itself. By moving away from traditional formats, we can open the door to different forms of storytelling, inviting in new perspectives, spaces, and voices that play a role in shaping and producing knowledge—voices that might otherwise be overlooked.
While critical legal historiography has already convincingly taught us the importance of localizing and diversifying the concepts and sources we use (Hespanha, 1986; Clavero, 1981; Gordon, 1984), there remains ample room to delve deeper into the significance of orality and oral sources. As the Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1980) noted, in many African contexts, oral tradition serves as “both religion, knowledge, natural science, initiation into the arts, and entertainment.” For those interested in the conditions of production and localization of normative knowledge, this approach represents a valuable—and necessary—path to explore.
References
Bâ, A. H. (1980). La tradition vivante. Histoire générale de l’Afrique, 1, 191-230, Paris: UNESCO.
Clavero, B. (1981). Institución política y derecho: Acerca del concepto historiográfico de “Estado moderno”. Revista de estudios políticos, (19), 43-58.
Descola, P. (2014). Beyond nature and culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Duve, T. (2020). What is global legal history? Comparative Legal History, 8 (2), 73-115.
Gordon, R. W. (1984). Critical legal histories. Stanford Law Review, 36(1/2), 57–125.
Hespanha, A. M. (1986). Centro e periferia nas estruturas administrativas do Antigo Regime. Ler História, 8(6).
Hoffmann, A. (2023). Listening to colonial history: Echoes of coercive knowledge production in historical sound recordings from Southern Africa. Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
Kolapo, F. J., & Akurang-Parry, K. C. (2007). African agency and European colonialism. University of America Press.
Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Yannakakis, Y. (2020). The art of being in-between: Native intermediaries, Indian identity, and local rule in colonial Oaxaca. Durham: Duke University Press.
Premo, B. (2017). The enlightenment on trial: ordinary litigants and colonialism in the Spanish Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vansina, J. (1985). Oral tradition as history. London: James Currey. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2015). Metafísicas canibais: Elementos para uma antropologia pós-estrutural. São Paulo: Cosac Naify.