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Percival Kirby’s wax cylinders: elegy onarchiving a deaf spotNiklas Zimmera

a Digitisation Services, University of Cape Town Libraries,University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South AfricaPublished online: 13 Feb 2015.

To cite this article: Niklas Zimmer (2015): Percival Kirby’s wax cylinders: elegy on archiving a deafspot, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, DOI: 10.1080/02533952.2014.988931

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Percival Kirby’s wax cylinders: elegy on archiving a deaf spot

Niklas Zimmer*

Digitisation Services, University of Cape Town Libraries, University of Cape Town, CapeTown, South Africa

This study intends to trace and think through a particular sequence of lossinvolved in creating and keeping phonographic historical records. As a piece ofwriting, it attempts to “uncontain” the waxen Ediphone and Dictaphone cylin-ders that form part of the Kirby Collection at the University of Cape Town. Inthis process of scratching for the sounds on these shells, and sounding out someof the vicarious and ulterior meanings invested in appraising ethnographic soundrecordings in the archive, even the activity of listening will sometimes stand inthe way of seeing sense here: while the cylinders are indeed tangible in thearchive, they are and do no longer sound as they were intended to. They mightbe deemed technically unworthy of archiving, but the legacy of colonial andapartheid state power echoing through archives of institutional and national heri-tage in South Africa can complicate making judgements on cassation to a pointof indefinitely suspended indecision. Non-sounding or excessively noisy soundcarriers comprise archival items that are almost mysteriously tangible and can beread as a powerful metaphor for a postcolonial condition in which an ideologicalapparatus pursuing information retrieval threatens to mechanically and institu-tionally perpetuate itself. Might these cylinders’ very lack of usefulness in thisregard serve to memorise those subaltern, sounding bodies that were sacrificedin the project of modernising Africa?

Keywords: Percival Kirby; phonograph; archive; wax cylinder;ethnomusicology; postcolonial

It is not necessary to have a keen ear in order to find out that the steps we take towardthe future sound hollow. But it is necessary to have concentrated hearing if one wishesto find out which type of vacuity resonates with our progress. (Flusser 2013, 3)

Storage

In 1981,1 the University of Cape Town (UCT) made the acquisition2 of what was tobecome a major institutional asset called the “The Kirby Collection”: “the most sig-nificant archive of traditional Southern African musical instruments in the world”(Monday Paper 2010) – at the time, essentially a large number of boxes and cratesfilled with about 600 musical instruments, papers, photographs and a small contin-gent of 48–553 phonographic (Ediphone and Dictaphone) wax cylinders. ThisKonvolut4 of materials constituted only part of the scattered inheritance from therenowned South African historian and musicologist Professor Percival Robson Kirby

*Email: niklas.zimmer@uct.ac.za

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Social Dynamics, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2014.988931

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(1887–1970), famous for his book The Musical Instruments of the Native Races ofSouth Africa (1934).5 The appraisal6 of this large holding at UCT, with the musicalinstruments at its centre, presents an ongoing archival, curatorial and restorativeendeavour. This text aims to contribute to a preliminary discussion of the complexi-ties involved in approaching the related phonographic wax cylinders in particular.

While the Kirby Collection was established at UCT, other sections of Kirby’sextensive inheritance went to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), IzikoSouth African National Gallery and the South African Heritage Resources Agency.This circumstance complicates matters in a number of ways and requires a few preli-minary remarks concerning the dynamics arising from rendering private collectionspublically accessible through the archive.

The archival discourse7 is a particularly sensitive and complex one in the postco-lonial South African context, where deliberations over the restructuring of institu-tions of hegemonic power (past and present) are deeply entangled with heritagematerials, especially with regard to the representation and construction of culturalidentities: “What constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems ofclassification signal at specific times are the very substance of colonial politics”(Stoler 2002, 92).

It would appear that from a purely disciplinary point of view, archival practicein Europe is less encumbered by the past,8 due to a high degree of specialisationand effective separation between records management and archival theory. Yet, par-ticularly with regard to the transfer of private records to state-run archives, the prob-lems around the regulation of custodianship are similar worldwide. In this instance,the Austrian State Archives report:

Since private records from estates, as well as archives of noble families and other fam-ily archives are not subject to the mandatory transfer of their holdings to state-runarchives, it is often a matter of coincidence rather than logical aspects where these willeventually be preserved. (Austrian State Archives 2008b)

Nevertheless, it should be clear that, rather than being conditioned bycoincidence, bequests of private and professional effects – in the case of Kirby,those of a historically significant researcher – to universities or other publicinstitutions involve negotiations between parties that are motivated by specificinterests. However haphazard and lacking in “logical aspects” such processes mayappear, they are nevertheless always taking place in a field of power relations.Particularly under conditions where the exact proceedings of such transfers are leftunregulated, the effects are never inconsequential or unilaterally (un-)desirable:“‘The archive,’ in other words, never speaks to us as a thing in and of itself. Itspeaks to us through the specificities of particular relations of power and societaldynamics” (Harris 2001).

The common ground that is created to accommodate the interests of thoseinvolved in the transfer – which may for instance manifest as the establishment of amuseum (collection) – generally serves to symbolise and historically stabilise thevalues of the dominant culture (see Herwitz 2012). Most importantly, if such collec-tions contain human subject research materials, the subjects who were once objectsof study, or relevant contemporary interested parties tend not to be consulted orincluded in such common-ground negotiations. In the case of sound recordings, thisoften means that those who are “on record” remain discursive subjects that are spo-ken about and are in a sense kept silent by institutional proceedings about which

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they are not consulted.9 Therefore, contemporary archival collections of prestigiousindividuals’ estates have an inbuilt tendency for perpetuating rather than complicat-ing, let alone overcoming, the ideological project that led to the creation and collec-tion of the human subject research materials they contain. Any notion of“coincidence” in this regard assumes a timeless and benign web of socio-historicalrelations, in which the biggest concern would be the efficient regulation of institu-tional procedures. However, the observable, non-coincidental motions described heresuggest a heterogeneous field of contesting histories, requiring a sustained criticalengagement with why and how records are selected and preserved – in short: uncon-tainment strategies. This is particularly important with regard to sound recordings ofwhat are essentially subaltern voices, as is the case with Kirby’s wax cylinders.

[S]ound, listening, and epistemology are far more problematically tangled withpower than is usually assumed in academic and art-theory discourse. Relinkingaurality and Erfahrung will not be possible through the academic exchange ofindividual listening experiences. It requires the construction of a (sonic) common;but the makeup of the community that would achieve such a thing has becomeobscure in our era of accelerated, transnational economics and communication.(Hallam 2012, n.p.)

Nevertheless, the particular complexities involved in dividing up and archiving(“housing”) Kirby’s overall estate at two universities, a museum and a nationalarchive are not the focus of this text. Instead, the remarks made above serve to indi-cate that while the materials that Kirby left behind are indeed numerous and varied,the primary reason for their ongoing, intensive curation must be the nature of theircontents above and beyond their embeddedness in different institutional contexts.The institutions housing Kirby’s human subject research materials, and the politicallandscape within which they operate, necessarily condition the nature and meaningof these materials, and the phonographic wax cylinders are a particularly pertinentexample of this. The following brief overview of their history shall serve to supporta few general thoughts on sonic10 absence later on in this text. As it turns out, thereis nothing altogether obvious or commonsensical about questions regarding the crea-tion, provenance, use, organisation, preservation, restoration, translation, descriptionand interpretation of these acoustical recordings.11 In their essentially use-less(unused and unusable) condition, these sound carriers12 present a somewhat uncom-fortable colonial legacy, and a burdensome challenge to contemporary researcherswith uncertain rewards and unclear responsibilities.

There exists no custodial history13 for these cylinders. They arrived with Kirby’sgreater collection and appear to have been in his possession (“care” would be thewrong term to use in an archival context) for several decades since their donation tohim by various parties. The cylinders reside in a wooden box labelled: Rev FrBarnes [S H S A?], Chipili, Fort [Roseberg?], with a scrap of label on one side:Ndola, N. Rhodesia and a further small label: Kirby cylinder recordings 71/107814

(but it is unlikely that they were all sent from this address, and impossible that theyall came from Barnes). It is more likely that various friends and colleagues sentthem to Kirby throughout the years, motivated by his public role as a kind of custo-dian of African traditional music, languages and customs. This may mean that thedonors generally did not know what (further) to do with such recordings themselves,or that they imagined that whichever particular cylinder(s) they were sendingcontained something of specific (historical, musicological, ethnographic) interest toKirby.

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One example of the difficulties around their provenance can be traced throughAndrew Bank’s notes on an exchange of letters between Donald Bain (Cape Town)and Percival Kirby (Johannesburg) in the 1930s, with the heading “BC 750 KirbyCollection: A Correspondence”:

DB > Prof. Kirby, 13/4/35, La Rochelle, Newlands […] My sister suggested to me,that the records of /Xam Bushman songs I got for the S.A. Museum in 1911 might beof help to you. I applied to Dr. Gill, who has handed over the cylinders, but the oldEdison Bell phonograph they were made with is so much out of order, that I have toget it repaired first before doing anything further. Some part has got lost, apparently,and the music shop is trying to hunt another up. If I can get the machine to work, andif I find the records still of any good – would you like me to send them to you withthe machine? The Museum would permit it.

From the subsequent letters, it appears that Bain then had got the machine to workagain, decided that only one15 of the cylinders may be of some use to Kirby, had itsent up to Johannesburg, and shortly thereafter posted the following disclaimer:

15/5/1936: […] ‘One cannot recognise any Bushman speech in any phonograph record,because the instrument omits the clicks. But there ought to be several more songs,according to my list and there are not any under the numbers they belong to in therecords given me. So I am beginning to be doubtful. The lid of the box is lost – so anywriting on it is gone. Still I am sure it is a Bushman song. Mr Drury of the Museumthought they were of Masarwa16 from the Eastern Kalahari – if so they are not frommy records. I am very sorry not to be more helpful […]’

These letters make so tangible the frustrations that arise from missing textual linksand broken mechanical parts. They echo in miniature the anxiety of modernist pro-gress: what was supposed to have been mechanically and objectively captured andfixed for comparative research and posterity has fallen out of reach again, throughthe mismatching lists and muddled or missing notes. Notably, the impossibility ofreplacing the contextual data for the recorded sounds as such, which only few of thefirst-line field recordists involved can make proper sense of, is an even more pro-found frustration than the impossibility of discerning subtle vocalisations with insuf-ficiently precise technology (in this case the phonograph). Thus, already before theabovementioned cylinder reached Kirby, it became a quixotic palimpsest of erasure:in losing its systematic, descriptive data, it directs the listener away from its raisond’être, towards its physicality as a modern factory product. This condition, togetherwith the strangeness of the sound system it carries – the otherness of the speech andmusic to its audience – renders it both hyper-specialised and rogue. The cylinderbecame adrift as something that forever urgently “might be of interest” to someone,lest it point to the deep contradictions invested in the original modernist endeavourof recording, analysing and preserving “cultures” in the first place.17 As a deteriorat-ing and no longer securely identifiable sound object, the wax cylinder begins todevelop a self-referential and mediated present state of its own. By some aporetic18

movement of material resistance, the fruition of these early field recordings lies ineventually sounding sheer noise. By turning themselves into recordings of their owndestruction, they symbolise, document and embody a total loss of useable informa-tion. Curious then, to witness how the reign of expectation over experience, ofdesire over knowledge continues to date, as in 2006 Myrtle Ryan of the SundayArgus reported: “The complicated clicks of extinct San languages will again beheard, thanks to modern technology, and because far-thinking scholars took the

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trouble to record them a century ago” (“Science Awakens Voices from the Past,”Sunday Argus, April 9, 2006).

Retrieval

We have to […] make a descent from the height of meaning back to what appeared tobe mere means; to catch the voice as a blind spot of making sense. (Dolar 2006, 124)

Kirby did indeed produce his own field recordings on wax cylinders, as he describesin detail, for instance, in his article “Musical Practices of the /?Auni and ≠KhomaniBushmen” (Kirby 1936b, 373):

I took with me on the [University of the Witwatersrand Kalahari] expedition a clock-work Dictaphone,19 with special recording horn and stand, a supply of wax cylinders[…] A simple and fool-proof recording outfit was absolutely necessary under the cir-cumstances, since the fine red desert sand got into everything, and all the working partshad to be cleaned frequently.

Kirby made these recordings in an attempt to “transcribe Bushman music inEuropean notation” (Kirby 1936b, 373). While these cylinders are not in the KirbyCollection, it has however also become unlikely that they may turn up in the waxcylinder store of the Bleek & Lloyd Collection housed at Iziko, which containsrecordings made by Reverend Howard Williams and Dorothea Bleek.20 Howeverparadoxical in terms of nomenclature, it is most unlikely that Kirby was involved inrecording onto any of the cylinders in the Kirby Collection. Therefore, as a sub-collection to an ethnomusicological archive and a museum of historical traditionalinstruments, these 48 objects that look like small artillery cartridges present a frac-tured, upside-down archive of sonic leftovers, pointing back towards many unknownor uncertain loci of biographical, geographical, and functional provenance. Thisbroadly contradicts how such items are generally interpreted and imagined by theinstitutions holding them. In a press release entitled “Sounds from Other Days,”Gerald Klinghardt from the Social History Collections Division at Iziko writes aboutthe Bleek & Lloyd cylinders:

At last we can hear again the voices of people from nearly a hundred years ago,describing their lives, telling folk stories, singing and playing music. […] This is thelanguage which was used for the new South African motto, !ke e: /xarra //ke (‘Unity inDiversity’). With the recovery of the sounds of /Xam and the oral traditions that arepart of our intangible heritage, these recordings, now listed in the UNESCO Memoryof the World Register, will help us along the way towards realising this nationalgoal.21

While it is true that in terms of sound quality and descriptive data, the Bleek &Lloyd Collection wax cylinders are more intact than those in the Kirby Collection, itnevertheless seems not only naive, but downright cynical to expect them to “recoveroral traditions,” and above that even to perform as part of a post-apartheid nation-building effort. What becomes very clear at this point is that over generations thewax cylinders have continued to attract an ideology of concernment and denialaround early research methodologies that has prevailed throughout the radical shiftsin South Africa’s socio-political history.

The imperial pretensions of modernity, which ended in the tragedy of totalitarianism,have been repeated in the age of globalization by the imperialists of the good who have

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invented the farce of integral reality where traditional Western values are pure simula-tions of their original long-dead selves. (Featherstone 2011, 474)

However lacking in self-reflexivity or unsound, the methodologies employed in theircreation and curation have been in the past, these waxen phonographs – as physicalobjects that are scratched and mouldy and long-since largely unintelligible22 – con-tinue to accumulate a symbolic currency that far outplays whatever they may containas conserves of sonic phenomena once recorded. Their story is an embodiment ofDerrida’s notion of the archive as a place of forgetting,23 and show, as Vosloo(2005, 385) put it, that “The story of memory, historiography and archiving istherefore also a story of selective remembering and (conscious or unconscious)forgetting.”

The first internal correspondence at UCT that makes mention of the cylinders is aletter from Dr Deirdre Hansen, senior lecturer in ethnomusicology and the firstcurator of the Kirby Collection, to Miss L. Twentyman-Jones, head of Manuscriptsand Archives division, dated May 17, 1984. In it, Hansen mentions having written to

Anthony Seeger of Indiana University in connection with […] (ii) the cylindricalrecordings which came with the Kirby Collection. […] I enclose his letter […]although I am sure you do not need advice about the storage of the recordings! […]Regarding the cylindrical recordings, I have now written to a Dr Lucy Duran (U.K.)[…] Apart from doing dubbings, she also provides free tapes for field work, if one letsher have copies of ones recordings for archival storage.

From this, it is clear that Kirby’s cylinders arrived into an environment without spe-cific sound curatorial expertise around their required handling and care. Furthermore,the comments on providing copies of archival sound materials in exchange for freetapes also present a testimony to a recent period in which it was still uncontestedand common practice for overseas institutions and individuals to offer material andtechnical support to African institutions in exchange for primary historical researchmaterials (with attendant intellectual copyright and access issues), something whichnowadays almost reads like the proverbial colonial trading of glass beads for land orcattle.

Not all support offered from overseas came with strings attached, though.Instead, at least in one case, Hansen was given specific information on the minimumengagement necessary with regard to these specialised records. In his responding let-ter, dated May 5, 1984, Anthony Seeger from the Archives of Traditional Music atIndiana wrote:

As for the wax cylinder recordings you have acquired, I recommend extreme care withtheir storage and preservation. They are extremely susceptible to mould, and suddenchanges of humidity or temperature are apt to crack them. There is probably some veryinteresting material on them, and the best thing to do with them is to store them care-fully until it is possible to make copies. Depending on what type of cylinders you have(they differ in size), they can be copied reasonably well with an old Edison cylinderplayer, with a good microphone directed into the horn. There are far more sophisticatedmachines which can be constructed, but for immediate preservation the Edison wouldbe adequate if the cylinders are washed and stored carefully for future efforts. We arein the process of copying onto tape the nearly 7000 cylinders in our collection. […] Iam enclosing the most recent issues of our quarterly, Resound, in which some aspectsof our work with the cylinders is described. Of particular interest to you might be thediscussion on washing and repair.

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After this communication, there is a gap of 18 years until the cylinders found men-tion again. For 18 years, the cylinders were not worked with at all at UCT, not evenin terms of being appropriately stored, let alone accessioned. An email, dated June14, 2002, with the subject line “Re: Wax cylinder recordings of Dorothea Bleek,”from Hansen to Lesley Hart, the new Manager of Special Collections InformationServices, reads:

For years I thought they had gone to your Archives, as they should have. Last yearthey were found in one of the rooms on C Level, while clearance was going on. I wasaway last year – sabbatical, and the cylinders were brought up to the collection. Theywere not placed in the Collection because it is undergoing conservation, so they wereplaced in my office amid the other stuff. They are in (a wooden box – original packag-ing) and in a big carton (which I have placed inside a roller bin.) Their nonremoval toarchives is a shocking oversight – I well recall they were packed up to go but some-how never left the college. I recall Kirby long ago mentioning them as having ‘per-ished’ but one never knows. Please take them home.

As is documented through many correspondences, Lesley Hart immediately set towork in gathering information on the playback and digitisation (electronic preserva-tion) of the sound material on the cylinders, with SABC Sound Archive, theNational Film, Video and Sound Archives and Dr Rob Perks from the BritishLibrary. From an email dated January 7, 2003 to the head of the National SoundArchives, we can see that Hart was still under the impression that:

[i]f the condition allows for the retrieval of any sound on them, they are of enormousimportance. Many of them were recorded by Dorothea Bleek early last century and areof San peoples. It is possible that recorded on some of them is a San language that isnow extinct. […] There are about 55 cylinders in total, mostly intact, but there is someevidence of mould.

Various correspondences in November and December 2004 show evidence of theinvolvement of several experts, and a marked increase in interest and activity aroundthe cylinders in general. Lindsay Hooper, collections manager Iziko, in her reportback to Patricia Davidson on a meeting with Hart on December 2, 2004, mentionsupcoming discussions with June and Johann Maree regarding optimal storage sys-tems, Megan Biesele regarding additional funding, Emanuelle Olivier regardingfunding from the French Institute, and Pippa Skotnes, Roger Chennell and NigelCrawhall regarding intellectual copyright rights. Hooper also mentions ideas aroundlinking the cylinders to “Skotnes’ Bleek & Lloyd materials,” and perhaps even: “thedevelopment of a commercial product (that is, a CD/DVD that could be madeavailable to researchers, universities, etc.”

From reading through the notes, it is obvious that at this stage, Hart held twomajor concerns: firstly, the material integrity of the cylinders being preserved in thedigitisation process24 and secondly, the copyright remaining with UCT/Iziko despitethe involvement of external expert services. Eventually, UCT and Iziko reachedbilateral agreements to co-join in the digitisation effort, and funding was secured(from National Lotteries amongst others) for this to proceed. Bill Prentice, audiodigitisation specialist at the National Sound Archives at British Libraries, was flownout for two weeks in February/March 2006, and, using a custom-built cylinderplayer worth over R100,000, Prentice performed the transfer from wax to digital ina soundproof room specifically rented for this purpose at SABC Studios.

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Reproduction

The object of archivistics theory, methodology and practice in the digital age is not thearchive-product but the archive-process. (Ketelaar 2007, 180)

While Prentice and his equipment performed at the highest international standards,25

the cylinders did not. A few weeks later, in an email to Francis Gerard at TheOrigins Centre, Hart writes:

Results are mixed. The cylinders containing the Bleek recordings are in generally quitegood condition […] The quality of sound, however, varies and some are quite faint.Some of the cylinders in the Kirby Collection were not in good condition, and thismeant that the quality of sound suffered. […] The recordings now require scholars tolisten to them, to identify and interpret, in order for us to know the worth of thecontent.

To date, six years later, it appears that no scholarly identification or interpretationhas taken place yet. Those that have taken the trouble to listen to the digital filesmade from the cylinders may have felt the same disappointment as myself – theyare sonically frustrating. A visual equivalent to the space they present to the listenerwould be a dark and blurry view of human shapes glimpsed from behind dark bars:the cylinder scrapes away mechanically at high speed (over 100 rpm) with repetitiveloud bursts, beyond which one can faintly hear distorted and muffled talking or sing-ing (mainly clerical songs), in more or less indiscernible African languages, as wellas some more or less stilted-sounding musical performances. Beyond such admit-tedly superficial and unqualified judgements, however, this material may indeed stillbe of interest for a variety of academic disciplines, notably historical comparativelinguistics, ethnomusicology, archaeology and historical studies in relation to (sub-Saharan) Africa. However, the fact that these recordings are now (digitally) accessi-ble must still be publicised more in the research community, and also non-academicengagement needs to be enabled by making copies available to possible descendantsand other interest groups. The Phonogrammarchiv Vienna programmatically outlinesthis field, for which UCT – and in fact most universities worldwide – currently haveno specific expertise to offer:

Phonography is concerned with the technical and methodological aspects of acousticdata recording, mainly of projects in the field of humanities. It aims to optimise meth-odology with respect to the specific research interest and the available technical possi-bilities. (Schüller 2007)

Amongst the many objects in the Kirby Collection is also a phonograph, but it isunlikely to be the very instrument employed by Kirby to make use of the cylinders,because its mandrel is not the required size for the cylinders and it is missing itsacoustical horn. This fact, together with the manner in which they had been stored(Kashe-Katiya 2010), makes it unlikely that they were ever played after their acqui-sition by UCT (pre-digitisation). Prentice summed up their condition in his report asfollows:

much of the Kirby collection had suffered badly, from mould and apparent evaporationof solvents. The latter had resulted in multiple lengthwise cracks along many cylinders,and coupled with heavy mould damage, meant that many of these cylinders could notbe played.26

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More importantly still, they had probably not been played for decades. MichaelNixon, former head of Ethnomusicology and African Music at the South AfricanCollege of Music and the current curator of the Kirby Collection summarised frommemory from Kirby’s scant written correspondences on this subject, that the latterhad already “played them to death” in the context of lectures, presentations at home,and personal research: “Unfortunately, as Kirby noted, the wax cylinder recordingsof his field work proved to be irreparably damaged and so the music was lost”(Kashe-Katiya 2010).

Therefore, it is most probable that even if they had been stored correctly, theremay have been very little left to hear on those that were actually of interest to Kirbyhimself. Depending on the materials used (yellow, black, blue, for example), Edisonwax cylinders can be played back a few 100 times as the sound recorded onto themdeteriorates ever more severely. Each time the playing needle is sent racing throughthe groove that spirals around the cylinder, it is forced upwards and downwards bythe hills and dales that were created by recording needle. On this journey, the mostfragile structures are chipped off, thereby rendering the microscopic landscape offrozen sound ever smoother over time. Eventually this “sound mould,” the cast copyof which is every present edition of listening experience, has been altered so muchas to play (rather than play back) nothing but a fuzzy chaos of hissing and crackling.These are abstract sounds, generated by the concrete traces of the destruction theplaying needle causes in the process of making audible what the recording(“writing”) needle was made to scratch into the wax in real time by the sound hittingthe diaphragm attached to it. In a sense, a reversal becomes apparent here: the(objectively mechanical) process of recording turns into one of “reading” sonicphenomena (“playback”), and the destructive process of reading turns into one ofover-writing this information (meaningfully formed matter) with meaningless tracesof use.

Considering the condition of the cylinders as described by Kirby himself, it issafe to assume that he used them to transcribe African music in Western notation27

and to play them back to interested audiences at home and in the context of aca-demic presentations. Records of musical transcriptions done by Kirby (on request byDorothea Bleek) do exist in the Bleek & Lloyd Collection (see Kirby 1936a). Kirbywas well aware of the technical limitations of the medium: in the 1950s, when hewas likely to have come into possession of at least some of those cylinders that arenow in UCT’s temperature-controlled Special Collections unit, it was commonknowledge how fragile wax cylinders were, as they had already all but gone out ofworldwide production by the early 1930s, to be replaced with the much more long-lasting lateral-cut phonograph disc. An article on this matter, published in 1935 inthe Zeitschrift fiir vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, gave the following advice ondealing with this specific issue:

In order to assure minimum handling and wear of wax originals, it also seemed advis-able to arrange for the production of three simultaneous identical copies. This hadanother advantage than a mere saving of time, for, being identical, one copy could bepreserved, if desired, inviolate in archives for the future, one could be played for dem-onstration purposes in lectures, or for transcribing, and one could be used for a masterin making additional copies. (Roberts and Lachmann 1935)

There is no record of Kirby ever producing copies of any of the cylinders, while atthe same time making such excessive use of those that were of interest to him as to

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eventually render them unusable28 – leading to the creation of the deaf spot archivedat UCT today. The fact that the now “perished” cylinders continued to exist, andwere acquired in conjunction with the main collection of musical instruments, bur-dens the University archive with a complicated responsibility: to re-evaluate thempositively, to “make” something “of” them. This process began with a speculationon their potential value in direct reference to the illustrious Bleek and LloydCollection:

‘The wax cylinders are unique, recorded in the field by Dorothea Bleek, Percival Kirbyand others and date from around 1905 until the 1930s,’ Lesley Hart, manager of theLibraries Special Collection Information Services, confirmed. […] ‘It is quite possiblethat those recorded by Dorothea of San peoples in the Northern Cape in 1911 mayallow us to hear San languages that are now extinct,’ she added. ‘Dorothea also tran-scribed some of these recordings so we have contextual information around them.’(Monday Paper 2006)

Supporting the view that the cylinders in the Kirby Collection are not the materialresult of Kirby having followed a particular research interest, but present a heteroge-neous collection of donations by colleagues near and far (such as, apart from DonaldBain, Louis Maingard and Raymond Dart) is that one of the most intact recordings(and at the same time the only one in a language of European heritage, Afrikaans) isa farmer’s “letter” to his son (digitised as 71_1082_LII_001noeq.wav), a text thathovers curiously between the spoken and the written, and has nothing to do withmusic, ethnology or academic research. One likely explanation for the continuedpresence of this cylinder in the Kirby Collection is that it was kept for deletion andre-use,29 which obviously did not happen. The reason for its being there in the firstplace may be personal or hobby-related, but at present, there are no other materialsavailable to support any assumptions. However, Michael Nixon, drawing notonly from his significant knowledge on Kirby’s life, but also on colonial history ingeneral, presents the most plausible theory, namely that this recording was part of adrama:

Kirby assisted the ATKV [Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurvereniging – AfrikaansLanguage and Culture Association] with some plays, and this odd ‘letter’ has some-thing of the literary about it. The story of sending a copy of the baptism certificate isextraordinary. The reference to paying two riksdollars is odd. They went out of circula-tion in the 19th century, I think, after the British took over in 1806. Possibly theAfrikaner nationalist speaker chose to refer to pounds as rijksdaalders. He also refersto Die Burger, which began publication in 1915, and sets an earliest date forthe recording (theatre production).30

What is interesting at this moment in negotiating the archive, however, is that wemeet with this wax cylinder recording without any supporting context. It is a textwithout its stage, begging questions and offering information that were most likelynot supposed to be asked and inferred originally. In the context of the voices on theethnographic recordings on the other cylinders, the voice on this one becomesambivalent and challenges the listeners to consider their notions of historical andmaterial authenticity in listening to these “field” recordings. Even though the record-ing of “the father” was most likely a scripted act, possibly a prop for a voice tocome from offstage while “the son” acts reading the letter on stage, in the KirbyCollection, it literally speaks a new intertext,31 gathering and creating new meaningsin relation to the other recordings of “real” “ethnic” voices, which themselves now

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open up in the listener’s imagination to the possibilities of acting, staging andaddressing an audience in the performance of being a research subject.

This recording presents the patriarchal voice of traditional Afrikaans fatherhood.However authentic or acted this performance is (for in both cases it is one), ringingout from in-between all those cylinders that have fallen silent – and those few thatstill require transcription, translation and phonetic analysis – is the voice of a coun-try “Boer” demanding filial obedience from his son studying in the Cape, a “jong”whom he fears may be straying from the righteous path of traditional Afrikaner val-ues. Another silent subject appears here: the next generation, those young Afrikanerswho were soon, during the freedom struggle against apartheid, to be referred to as“oppressors.” In this unusual sound recording, we are witness to the rare case of amessage with a direct addressee, here in the form of a spoken letter: a youngAfrikaans man, a student, is spoken to by his father, who is at the same time alsospeaking about him. We will never hear the addressee-cum-subject’s own voice, ashis reply (if there ever was one) went unrecorded, unless perhaps in the setting ofthe alleged theatre production. In a very logical progression of the history of arecording medium that uses itself up in the process of being listened to, what hassurvived in the Kirby Collection is that which has been of lesser interest to Kirby,while at the same time that which was of interest to him was, without care to createpreservation copies, was played to death.

There are currently two types of cylinders in the Kirby Collection: those that arecracked, unplayable and therefore utterly silent, and those that are used, old andtherefore excessively noisy at playback. In the case of old wax cylinders, the “noise”comprises (at least) three components: firstly, the machine’s recording of itself (noiseof the mechanism, uniquely modulated sound spectrum); secondly, the cylinder’s“recording” of its own degrading (destructive playback by needle) and thirdly,the wax ageing over time (mould and cracks due to changes in humidity andtemperature).

Ever since the advent of digital sound technology, a large number of softwarecompanies have been developing highly specialised products to deal with a widevariety of audio editing requirements and possibilities. It can still appear to our earsas a kind of magic, when (through digital processing rather than electro-mechanicalfiltering) a whole “wall” or “sea” of (patterned) noise suddenly falls away andvoices (for instance) that lay hidden behind or inside of it suddenly become audibleand possibly even intelligible. It can be the sonic equivalent of taking off one’s sun-glasses in a dark room, unless the room is empty.

To illustrate this move from noise (noisy near-silence) to “denoised” near-silence, see the below example, two screenshots of the waveforms of file“71_1079_NOID1_001noeq.aif” before (Figure 1) and after (Figure 2) digitalprocessing.

While, as Lesley Hart writes, we are “still in hopes that more advanced tech-nology will enable us to get a better result from the recordings one day,”32 it islikely that any future efforts to access more intelligible information through evenmore specialised digital imaging technology such as Praat (Figure 3) will beforensic in nature and yield (phonetic) statistics such as palatal click-counts, butnot an improved listening experience in terms of audible, that is discerniblespeech sounds.

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Interpretation

Let us for the moment leave aside the question of the mechanically broken cylindersand what to do with them, and let us also for the moment leave the digitised butsonically “dead” cylinders to the linguists and ethnomusicologists to do theirresearch on, and instead focus on the one cylinder that is neither unusable nor

Figure 1. “71_1079_NOID1_001noeq.aif” (unprocessed) [screenshot from Logic Pro].

Figure 2. “71_1079_NOID1_001noeq-x-noise” (processed using Waves “X-noise”) [screen-shot from Logic Pro].

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sonically “dead.” As a non-ethnographic misfit in the Kirby Collection, the Letterfrom his parents [sic] to Jakob addresses the interdisciplinary potential of soundstudies. As a personal message accidentally salvaged from inside a cultural circlethat lay outside the ethnographic relationship between (European) researchers and(African “indigenous”) human subjects, as it were – a record that survived becauseit was of no scientific interest – it now challenges us to think through possiblecourses of action in relation to this item in the sound archive, such as cassation,de-accessioning and re-accessioning into another collection, artistic intervention33

and others. This is for us an unintentionally productive and valuable mistake to havebeen incorporated into the present archive. The experience of listening to the faint,high voice of the father reading out his (and nominally his wife’s) letter to the soncan never be replaced by a written text. Yet, in its formal organisation, including dif-ferent brackets, comments and line breaks, the following transcript and translationpresent a work of gleaning and offering understandings. It makes visible thetechnological lacunae and acknowledges the linguistic and socio-historical,“cultural” hiatuses that listening involves. I preface this first engagement with a notefrom my transcriber and translator, Louise Potgieter: “there are sections I do notunderstand very well, and the proper names are hard to make out. Towards the end,the voice becomes harder to hear, but I hope this rough translation will give you thegist of it.”

Translation into English from a transcription in Afrikaans of wax cylinder“71_1082_LII” in the Kirby Collection, digitised as “71_1082_LII_001noeq.wav”:

Figure 3. “71_1079_NOID1_001noeq.aif” (unprocessed) [screenshot from Praat].

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Letter from his parents to Jakob (…) de Jongh/ de Kol {?}

Dear young man {‘jong’}

I have received your letter with happiness to hear that your health is still good, andwith regret that your pocket seems to be empty again.

It will just have to stay ‘sore’ until the end of term, and perhaps you will start nextterm with more caution born out of experience.

Perhaps the ‘lack’ will be good for you in another way, it will inspire /motivate you tospend more time and effort keeping your mind ‘purer’ on your higher subjects – partic-ularly mathematics, algebra (…)

And you will develop an eagerness to take these subjects to exceptional heights,eventually managing well in untangling the complicated (…)

Pocket money {something about saying boy he’s not getting enough to get through theterm}

How much do you have at your disposal to waste every day?

One must not pull at the cow’s udder again at 11 o’clock in the day – she can kickback.

I came upon an article in the Burger about a football {rugby} match in the Cape –which is not the kind of reading material I usually peruse – but my attention wascaught this time by your name printed in it repeatedly.

You must have been a real ‘cock about town’ / show-off / ‘star’ there at that story{‘Spulletjie’}, and the mention of your great talent by the newspaper would have beenmuch more honourable and brought you more ‘glory’/would have (…) been much bet-ter (and received by me) if applied to (…) your learning/academics (…)

I don’t blame you for taking part in this ridiculous rubbish

Just don’t let me receive a doctors’ letter when you – as I am expecting – will hurtyourself, kicking (…)

I understand that your body needs exercise, to blow out some of out the strain on your‘psyche’/ psychological state {geestes-toestand} which you write about well, and nextholiday when you come home I will make sure you get more than enough of it by (…)tilling the earth / working (on) the land

I talk about the body because I’ve become a bit apprehensive that your higher learningis suffering [at the expense of this rubbish sport] (…)

In your last letter you used a few English words – in brackets yes or underlined, butthis makes your bad work even more disgusting

A good respected (qualified/educated) working man {something to the effect of is mea-sured by his purity of language}

I like a good (…) {some sort of game dish}. But I need to know it is your mother’sbacon, otherwise I throw out the game-loin with the bacon (…) {a kind of saying Iassume}

Make sure that in the future you keep all thoughts/words that are bad for your mother-language to yourself and do not share them with me,

Otherwise I will start playing football (rugby) and you will swear (…)

Then I notice that you sign your name now as ‘John,’ and sometimes even ‘Jo’?

To pronounce the j and o is a kind of ability that we apparently inherited from one oranother kind of wild animal/creature.

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But to help you with your uncertainty and confusion I include with his letter a propercopy of your christening certificate/papers.

And if the woman that runs your boarding-house still struggles (…) you can ask the(…) to help you spell your name J, a, n Jan from the (…)

I paid two Rijksdaalers to the deacon for the copy out of the church books, and I willsubtract it from your pocket money next term, since I understand that you have nomoney to pay for it right now.

Here at us … {problems, irritations}

Gabriel Horrelvoet {clubfoot} and I are having disputes around the border post in thecorner by the Vlei-land.

I had a ‘skepsel’ {creature}34 there to move it back and forth; eventually the two holeswere so deep (…)

Talking of old Gabriel, his daughter Liesbet likes to come to talk (with us) on post-dayand the way she eagerly enquires after you, one would swear she is your sister or ourcousin.

Today we didn’t see eye to eye, she already talks of your BA, and I talk of our BAk – e – p – a – b – o – o – n {?}.

Last week (…)

Yesterday {?} stole some of our water again to water his sweet potatoes, I grabbed his(jong) ‘boy’s’ {black labourer} spade out of his hands and whacked him (…)

Old Sarel cheated me with a red-spotted cow that only gives a few drops of blue milk(…)

Your mother is sending you some biltong and biscuits,

I have labelled the lid ‘colonial (…) product: ostrich biltong’ since they are so strictabout cake {something to the effect of underneath, and keep to self}

I still want to write, but (…)

Greetings from your Father

Conclusion

The belly craves food […], the tongue craves water, the heart craves love, and themind craves stories. (Mitchell 2010, 310)

The process of archival appraisal – the “decision which part of the documentsoffered for transfer by a registry has archival quality and should thus be kept perma-nently, and which has not and should therefore be discarded” – is already systemi-cally a contentious one, because it involves making value judgements about whichitem “should be kept in the archive permanently because it is of legal, historical,artistic or other value and related significance” (Austrian State Archives 2008a).This decision-making is indispensible, particularly in the era of digital archives,which is marked by an information crunch. The neurological activities involved inconsciousness moderate awareness of sensorial input through unconscious, “auto-matic” filtering mechanisms in order to make sure that perception does not becomeoverloaded and the organism becomes unable to act. In a loosely drawn comparisonbetween biological and institutional information architectures, it appears that

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archival management in the age of the digital turn has to perform analogously to thisneurological filter in order to stay functional. Archival theory however complicatesthis process with regard to the ethical, “cultural” or (inter-)disciplinary qualities ofmaterials, particularly those that are currently categorised as comprising “(national)heritage.” Especially in relation to “sound, listening and modernity,”35 a relevantdiscourse is still emerging, and requires nurturing at institutions that historically andconventionally tend to treat sound and hearing as a secondary phenomenon andsense to vision and sight.

A hundred years after colonial researchers have travelled into “the field” andreached into the lives of various indigenous peoples of southern Africa for an exem-plary few snippets of their musical traditions and their linguistic sound systems, wesit here with their records made of wax, records which unintentionally embody theparadox of the overall endeavour: the more often they are played (back), the lessproperly they sound (back). In the pre-digitisation era, each accessing motion under-mined future efforts to retrieve the information stored on them, forever reducingwhat now remains to increasingly unusable leftovers.

The careless erasure of what ethnography most urgently wanted to hear, a keyaspect of the aural past of imperialism, has been embalmed in the Kirby Collectionas a deaf spot. This erasure-through-listening of what we now can no longer listento participates in the origin myth of our media-saturated present, where – virtually –“everything” is recorded and instantly shared. The historically comparatively stabledistinctions between production and consumption, “author” and “reader” are in theprocess of tipping and even switching. It seems that the present anxiety around col-lapsing the real into the virtual is essentially fuelled by existential fear; in – virtual –respite from the relatively isolated and insignificant reality of the modernindividuals’ life experience, whatever is recorded and shared may amplify itself innarcissistic splendour across global networks, and – at least virtually – become animmortal text, a “message” or a “post.” In the meantime, the descendants of the!Auni who performed their dance songs and children’s songs in front of the rotatingcylinders now lying still and broken in the Kirby Collection remain the mostseverely disenfranchised and unfairly treated people in democratic South Africa todate. While the production of these sound casts did not involve the violence of otherethnographic practices of collecting human research material (remains), their pres-ence in UCT’s archive does echo these other, chilling artefacts currently haunting somany institutional repositories worldwide.

Their memory, and the memory of all the other human research subjects whowere recorded, cast in plaster from life, measured and photographed, however con-stituted in the elisions, fractures, blind and deaf spots in the archives of the present,challenges us to never separate recording from memorising, nor to ever confuse thetwo. More than ever before, there appears a lack of commitment to sustained rela-tionships with the living storytellers, those who, as human beings, mediate reper-toires that take on many functions associated with archive,36 and may never be“played to death.” Only if we actively acknowledge the deaf spots of our technicalmedia archive can we begin to revisit those places within it that bear the potentialfor productively investigating the history of past research methodologies and prac-tices, and develop new, more integrated practices and sustainable relationshipsbetween (subjects, researchers and archivists) from there.

In answer to my question in this regard to Bonny Sands, a comparative historicallinguist from Northern Arizona University currently working at UCT’s Centre for

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African Language Diversity (CALDi) on the phonetics of Hadza recorded on reel-to-reel tapes by Ernst Westphal in the 1960s, she put me in touch with another lin-guist, Anne-Maria Fehn, who had taken the next step and brought Westphal’s Handarecordings (which had recently been digitised) “back”37 to Botswana. The impact ofthese old recordings on the community was profound, she wrote to me, because herTs’ixa consultants recognised the voices of their parents. Anne-Maria (email commu-nication) reports:

The person speaking on the Handa recordings is Kebuelemang Kgosi Itsele, formerchief of the Ts’ixa. His youngest son Kgosimontle ‘Anxious’ Kebuelemang is the cur-rent chief of Mababe. Kebuelemang Kgosi Itsele and his wife were well known amongtheir fellow villagers and are fondly remembered by everyone. Some people even criedwhen I played the recordings to them. These recordings are especially interestingbecause grammar, lexicon and pronunciation differ in part from what I (and otherspeakers) would consider common ‘Ts’ixa’. After listening to the recordings, peoplesuggested to me that Kebuelemang spoke the way he spoke because his mother was aBuga-woman from Khwai. (Hence why these recordings may not only be interestingfor the communities, but also for researchers now working with the communities inwhich they were made.)

It is important to acknowledge first of all that the gesture of having the sound ofthese familiar voices brought back to them (and in this case to say “back” is almostcorrect) is what mattered so deeply to the people of Mababe. Secondly, in therecordings, they were able to be witness to an exchange between a researcher andhis interviewee. Differently to a camera, which tends to aid in the production ofimages that are of everything but the photographer, the microphone picks up and issupposed to pick up, the voice of the interviewer as well. The composite nature ofmany voice recordings such as this one adds another dimension to the move of“returning” the sounds of voices from the past. The presences that have fallen silentdue to the faulty recording media may arguably engage our imagination more thanthe functioning records to investigate the never-ending reverberations of powerinscribed – written in material, “analogue” cipher – into these objects.

The notebooks of paper, the photographic negatives of glass and celluloid, thebody casts of plaster of Paris, the cylinders of wax – materials, apparatus’ and pro-cesses brought by researchers into the many diverse cultural geographies of southernAfrica – were conceived of and employed in order to scientifically, objectivelyobserve, measure and record the people who were living there – people who lived,thought and felt differently, who looked different, and who sounded different whenthey spoke their languages. In some sense, the modernist future that these investiga-tions and archiving motions projected did arrive: much of the indigenous knowl-edges and ways of life threatened by colonialist invasion have already ceased toexist. The legacy of colonial envisionings of the future – such as are in various waysinscribed in Kirby’s wax cylinders – is what present-day, postcolonial archives aremade up of. To transform rather than perpetuate, this legacy implies a sustainedengagement in a complex range of activities that claim new subject positions and, inthe present case, necessitate new modes of listening.

The archival principals of impartiality,38 imprescriptibility39 and inalienability40

govern its mandate to preserve any records in its care, whatever condition these maybe in. Institutional memory is a curious mixture of “human resources” and “specialcollections,” and it cannot exist without a careful balance of the two.Institutionalised records fall silent when living memories are not brought to bear on

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them in the form of sustained, critical engagement that takes cognisance of the ethi-cal responsibilities involved in working with the materials invested in the institu-tional body. No matter how much “social capital”41 (members of) an institutionsuch as a university may have acquired and inherited, when it abnegates the respon-sibilities that come with thinking about its own future in relation with these records,they become empty shells. From this point onwards, any claims that the institutionmakes on such forms of capital point to a “cultural” void in the present – a deafspot. The cycle of imperialist violence that human research materials such as the eth-nographic phonographs discussed here take part in may begin to find closure intransformative engagements; for instance when the voices are taken out of captivity,and researchers from within the cultural geography where the recordings were cre-ated begin to engage them along new lines of investigation, listening for alternativemeanings and modulating the historical canon with previously and currentlyunthinkable understandings of their contents. This could turn out to be a poetic orcollaborative kind of work that would, in its lack of rapaciousness run the risk ofbeing undermined by repatriative moves as referenced above. Unconsidered repatria-tion may in fact turn out to be an ethical double standard, serving only the interestsof the former coloniser’s or current researcher’s position.

Nevertheless, while any living understanding of the complex conditionality ofKirby’s wax cylinders fades away, vital connections between past and future disci-plinary concerns in the various fields they may have been of interest to (traditionally,these would in the first instance be dialectology, ethnolinguistics and ethnomusicol-ogy) are lost. Still, beyond the specifics of individual research projects, all of theseengagements at present imply a new set of activities related to archiving, specificallyin the rapidly changing universe of information technology:

If institutional archivists do not become ‘knowledge managers’ (for want of a betterterm) then their position will become more and more untenable in the coming years. Inaddition, in our professional schools, we must design courses to reach out to studentsin business schools, engineering, and the sciences. These are the people who will bethe creators of records in the future and consumers of the archival product. Simply cap-turing at low marginal costs the waste stream of records management programs willnot be enough to establish these archival programs as an asset to the corporate entity.(King 2002)

With the increase in anonymous, virtually limitless data capture, humanity isreaching beyond history: the moment when no-thing is thinking, but everything isacted out in total silence. This would be the new, global nation: the nation afterwonder, the nation of stasis. It is hoped that this paper has made the silence audi-ble into which we need to softly sing an elegy to those nameless and dispossessedhuman beings whose voices we have first taken and then lost. What can wemeaningfully dedicate to those who were recorded, those whom we can hear butcannot name?

AcknowledgementsI am indebted to Professor Michael Nixon (head of Ethnomusicology and African Music atthe South African College of Music and curator of the Kirby Collection), and Lesley Hart(Manager of Special Collections at the University of Cape Town Libraries) for their kind sup-port towards my research for this paper.

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Notes1. So far, we have found no documentation of the exact date, except that in the Manu-

scripts & Archives diary for 1983, an entry on June 6 states that Deidre Hansen, thencurator of the Kirby Collection, had informed UCT Libraries’ Special Collections unitthat there were manuscripts with the Kirby Collection. There is nothing in the diaryabout the manuscripts being transferred there, but that is what must have happened,since in November the diary states that Dr Hansen needed access to the manuscripts,and they were still in fumigation (a routine procedure for any new collections cominginto the Library).

2. “(a). The process or activity by which an item, fonds or collection enter the custody ofan archives. (b). An addition to the holdings of an archives by transfer, deposit, pur-chase, gift or bequest” (Hadley and Gourlie 2006, 1).

3. The exact number varies in respective lists and correspondences and may change againas new cylinders turn up.

4. Konvolut is the German archival term for “mixed lot,” which I find productive to use inan English text, as it becomes expressive of the complexity of the interrelatedness ofvaried materials of (possibly) the same provenance, before they are separated, rear-ranged and labelled according to an archival ordering logic.

5. Interestingly, Curt Sachs, a German contemporary of Kirby’s, published a review of thisbook in 1936, in which he states that “Kirby knows nothing of the scientific study ofinstruments nor of comparative musicology, which are being practised in other countriesfor decades already. He knows nothing of their concepts nor their terminology” (Sachs1936, 132).

6. “The process of determining the archival value and disposition of records based on theirformer administrative, legal and fiscal use; their evidential and informational value; theirarrangement; and their relationship to other records. Also known as ‘selective retention.’(*2) Not to be confused with monetary value” (Hadley and Gourlie 2006, 2).

7. Valderhaug positions this expanding disciplinary network as follows: “The archivalprofession, archival education and archival science as a scientific discipline can neverbe separated from the society in which the records are created, preserved and used”(Valderhaug 2013).

8. I understand that this could be misread as a gross and unnecessary generalisation. Some-one who has tackled the immense memory work still to be done in Germany forinstance is Barbara Gabriel (see Gabriel 2004).

9. In this regard, see for instance, Anette Hoffmann’s exemplary interdisciplinary exhibi-tion “What We See,” which opened at the Iziko Slave Lodge in February 2009, and hassince then travelled to Basel, Vienna, Osnabrück, Berlin and Windhoek. The publica-tion, What We See: Reconsidering an Anthropometrical Collection from Southern Africa– Images, Voices and Versioning (Hoffmann 2009), accompanied the exhibition.

10. “Sonic,” relating to audible sound in general, including the notion of “aural” as pertain-ing to human (auditory) perception (via the ear, but also the skin and the body overall).

11. Mechanical analogue recordings made prior to the introduction of microphones, electri-cal recording and amplification (roughly 1877–1925).

12. This term in its wider use refers to the physical method of storing audio (data), and inits narrower, contemporary use specifically to digital audio file formats.

13. “That part of a finding aid illustrating the chain of agencies, officers, or persons exercis-ing custody over the archival material described therein” (School of Library, Archivaland Informational Studies 2014).

14. UCT Libraries: KIRBY COLLECTION: WAX CYLINDER RECORDINGS (Word docu-ment) (2013), 1.

15. Donald Bain’s notes for the cylinder in question, according to Bank’s transcription,read: IX: Man’s song; Woman’s song of thirst; Woman’s song of war with Bondelswarts:Another woman’s song of Bushmen who lived beyond river.

16. On the complexities around this term, see: Motzafi-Haller (1994).17. A famous example of the split nature of modern colonial mentality is Albert Kahn’s

“Catalogue of Humanity,” a photographic archive of the cultures of the world, begunimmediately before the outbreak of WWI. This “catalogue” idyllically immortalised in

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its thousands of images the cultures and landscapes which the war proceeded to scar sodeeply or even entirely destroy.

18. Derrida has made use of the term “aporia” – a Greek term denoting a logical contradic-tion – with its rich history of use in rhetoric and logic, in relation to texts in order to“indicate a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obvi-ously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself” (1993,39). It seems important to reference this deconstructivist notion of a built-in contradic-tion with regards to the analogous deficiencies of the wax cylinder.

19. “The Ediphone and subsequent wax cylinders used in Edison’s other product linescontinued to be sold up until 1929 when the Edison Company [f]olded. The name‘Dictaphone’ trademark was originally registered by the Columbia Gramophone Companyin 1907. Dictaphone was spun off into a separate company in 1923 and continued manufac-turing wax cylinder dictating equipment up until 1947” (Video Interchange 2013).

20. “The Bleek & Lloyd Collection which […] documents nineteenth and early twentiethcentury San languages and culture, includes a large number of phonograph soundrecordings made from around 1905 to the 1930s” (Press release: Sounds from OtherDays by Gerald Klinghardt, Social History Collections Division, Iziko).

21. Press release: Sounds from Other Days by Gerald Klinghardt, Social History CollectionsDivision, Iziko.

22. The notable lack of terminology related to the specifics of listening necessitates the useof the more general term “unintelligible” here, which at the same time highlights howclosely linked the notions of sensing (hearing) and understanding are in the English-speaking world. “To make out” is a further case in point.

23. This is a reference to Derrida’s seminar given at Wits as recorded in Hamilton et al.(Derrida 2002, 38).

24. Mention is made of investigations into laser technology, a non-destructive process thatcould have been developed and applied internally at UCT’s Department of ComputerScience (Professor Edwin Blake), but after some correspondence, this eventually didnot take place. In recent years, advancements in laser technology have made it possibleto create optical, three-dimensional digital reproductions of the aural information storedin the grooves in the wax of the phonograph cylinders, but the current cost-benefitassessment does not warrant the significant additional expense of calling in yet anotherteam of specialists, nor do the results seem to sound any better than the augmented tra-ditional method of using a needle and pickup.

25. As is current standard practice, Prentice created a plain text document (entitled “Over-view”) in the folder with the digitised audio files he created from the wax cylinders:“This folder (‘Kirby collection cylinder recordings’) contains audio material and relatedtechnical metadata. The recordings are digital transfers of cylinders owned by UCTLibraries, South Africa. The transfers were carried out by Will Prentice of the BritishLibrary Sound Archive, between 20 and 23 February 2006, at the SABC studios inCape Town, using BLSA equipment. // The actual cylinders are not currently individu-ally accessioned, but grouped in boxes with collective accession numbers. The archivaldigital transfers have been organized in similar fashion here, with a separate folder ofaudio files created for each accession number (‘71_1078’ etc). All audio files are mono,consisting of 24 bit samples at 96 kHz sampling rate, in WAVE (.wav) format. // Eachsuch folder also contains a text document in Microsoft Word (.doc) format, detailing thetransfer of each cylinder. In order to avoid any ambiguity over the identity of eachtransfer, a slip of paper has been placed in each actual cylinder, giving the filename ofthe transfer of that cylinder. // In addition, a file named ‘CD audio unprocessed’ con-tains all the above audio files, but converted to 16 bit samples at 44.1 kHz samplingrate, which can be burned in standard audio CD format. It is subdivided into 3 folders,the contents of each being of an appropriate capacity to burn to one CD. // A file named‘CD audio processed’ contains all the same audio material, but has been processedusing Sony Audio Restoration software, and high and low pass filters (at approx250 Hz and 4 kHz, but varying according to each individual recording). All processingwas carried out using Sony Sound Forge v8.”

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26. Will Prentice, Technical Services, British Library, UK and Lesley Hart, InformationServices, University of Cape Town Libraries, SA: Report: Bleek & Kirby Collection:Digitizing the Wax Cylinders, March 2006.

27. As Michael Nixon informed me, there are numerous transcriptions of music-making inKirby’s manuscripts and in his publications, and some more extensive ones appear tobe from the recordings. One example can be found in a list of recordings that Kirbysent to Fitz Moldenhauer (or Mollenhauer).

28. What would be the equivalent aural adjective to the visual concepts “obscure” or“opaque”? Is a “blind” mirror a “deaf” echo? Silent? Overburdened with noise?“Unlistenable”? Muffled, damped, dark, cloudy, whispered? Not one word seems toquite fit the analogous meaning, a sure indicator for how in a sense incomparable theseworlds of perception are.

29. A wax cylinder can be shaved/polished, resulting in a newly smooth surface to berecorded on (scratched into) again, similarly to how the magnetised surface of acompact audiocassette can be re-magnetised by recording over it again. The fact thatthe sound of this cylinder is noticeably clearer than that of the others is proof of itslesser use and supports the theory that it was stored for its material value rather than itscontents.

30. Email from Michael Nixon on January 16, 2014.31. “In the first place, there is the recognition that a textual segment, sentence, utterance or

paragraph is not simply the intersection of two voices in direct or indirect discourse;rather, the segment is the result of the intersection of a number of voices, of a numberof textual interventions, which are combined in, the semantic field, but also in thesyntactic and phonic fields of the explicit utterance. So there is the idea of thisplurality of phonic, syntactic, and semantic participation” (Julia Kristeva, quoted inDimitrakopoulou 2011).

32. Email correspondence from June 12, 2013.33. “Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from

servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbi-ter and distorter of his work” (Sontag 1967, n.p.).

34. “The Dutch word schepsel (‘creature,’ ‘created being,’ ‘God’s creature’) came to bemost often defined in South African usage in a telling collocation: ‘creature, native.’Non-whites were physically excluded from the South African citizenry into ‘tribalhomelands’ or ‘bantustans’ and linguistically banished from humanity into creature-hood. Apartheid theology relegated unity to invisibility: in this ‘invisible unity,’ all areunified in Christ and equal in the eyes of God. The ‘visible church,’ meanwhile, mustherald ‘pluriformity’ or, in laymen’s terms, segregation and inequality” (Pechey 2005).

35. A key overview in this regard is Erlmann (2004).36. On the relationship between repertoire and archive, see Taylor (2003).37. To say “back” is of course actually incorrect here since, generally speaking, sound

recordings are made rather than taken. Nevertheless, the epistemological logic underpin-ning a “clear use” of language almost forces such contextual slippages.

38. “The quality of archives deriving from the fact or circumstance of their creation asmeans of carrying out activities and not as ends in themselves, and therefore of inher-ently being capable of revealing the truth about those activities” (School of Library,Archival and Informational Studies 2014, 8).

39. “The quality of public archives or archival documents of remaining rightfully publicproperty despite any interruption in their custody, and therefore remaining continuallysubject to replevin” (School of Library, Archival and Informational Studies 2014, 8).

40. “The quality of public archives or archival documents of being incapable of being alien-ated or surrendered to a person or organization which is not entitled by law to theirownership” (School of Library, Archival and Informational Studies 2014, 8).

41. “Social capital is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individualor a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalizedrelationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (Bourdieu, in Bourdieu andWacquant 1992, 119).

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Notes on contributorNiklas Zimmer lives and works in Cape Town, where he has completed a research MA onJazz photography (which drew critical reflections on Fine Arts, social history and music),and an Honours degree in Fine Art in sculpture at the University of Cape Town. He also hasa BA in education from the University of Cologne. He is currently employed as an audiospecialist at Digitisation Services, UCT Libraries, and part-time lecturer in theory anddiscourse of art, critical studies, video, sound and photography. Furthermore, he works as anindependent photographer and drummer.

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