Exploring colonial normativities in Africa through podcasting
In her latest post for our Legal History Insights blog, Raquel R. Sirotti recounts a research trip she and two colleagues took to Maputo, where they explored the depths of colonial archives and sought out voices rarely captured in official records. Faced with the limitations of written sources, they turned to oral histories and woven these stories into Tramas Coloniais, a documentary podcast that reimagines how African stories can be told.
'To write a history of colonialism and its normativities in Africa that truly seeks to understand and highlight the agency of Africans and their forms of knowledge production, it is crucial to go beyond written sources,' she reflects. 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 of documenting and transmitting meanings in many African societies.'