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The Challenges of Sharing (Colonial) Sound Archives in Rwanda

Rémy Jadinon
Traduction de Julia Mc Laren
Cet article est une traduction de :
Les défis du partage des archives sonores (coloniales) au Rwanda [fr]

Texte intégral

Athanase Sebatunzi, inanga zither player.

Athanase Sebatunzi, inanga zither player.

MP.0.0.3216, collection MRAC Tervuren ; photo J. Gansemans, 1974 © MRAC Tervuren.

1On October 28, 2021, the Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale (MRAC) in Tervuren, Belgium, transferred more than four thousand sound recordings of Rwandan musical traditions from its collections to the Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy (RCHA). A ceremony was then held at the Rwanda Art Museum in Kigali, where the Belgian ambassador to Rwanda, Bert Versmessen, handed over a hard disk containing a copy of this musical heritage to Robert Masozera, the RCHA’s director general (Fig. 1). The Belgian ambassador declared that “this transfer demonstrates the strong ties forged between the two countries,” and was an effort that “would not stop at sounds and songs but would extend to other types of artistic creations conserved in Belgium and collected during the colonial period.” This transfer was the result of discussions initiated in 2018 at an international conference1 just a few months before the MRAC reopened to the public and in the midst of a debate on the restitution of cultural heritage held in Europe, instigated a year earlier by French President Emmanuel Macron in Ouagadougou,2 which led to the “Restituer le patrimoine africain” report (Sarr and Savoy 2018), providing a reflection framework for claims for the restitution of property acquired during the colonial period.

2During the conference, MRAC director Guido Gryseels committed to sharing the cultural heritage collected during and after the colonial period and to strengthening conservation and collection management capacities within museums and research institutes in both Belgium and Rwanda. This commitment has resulted in the Share project’s five-year cooperation program, which was implemented between 2019 and 2023.

The Share Project’s Musicological Component

3The MRAC’s Rwandan music collections comprise 4,096 archives,3 1,031 field photographs,4 and 93 musical instruments.5 Although they have been digitized, they can still primarily only be consulted via in-house databases, which means that source communities have little access to them. This limitation is due to compliance with legislation on the intellectual property of the collections. The MRAC does not have reproduction rights for all its collections and therefore cannot publish them under open access.

  • 6 The Scohy-Stroobants mission in 1954 for Radio Congo Belge; the studies carried out by Jacques Maqu (...)
  • 7 A total of 1,023 recordings were made by Jos Gansemans during this period (source: MRAC archives).
  • 8 During the missions I carried out as part of the Share project, only a few tapes were identified, b (...)

4The MRAC’s sound archives include first-hand collections by the institution’s staff and exchanges with collaborators as well as sound publications edited by record companies. The accompanying metadata has not been systematically reviewed: some descriptions dating back to colonial times contain false, incomplete, or even racist information. Making them available online as they stand is problematic. The majority of the MRAC’s Rwandan music collections, with the exception of a few studies dating back to the 1950s,6 are the result of research into Rwandan musical instruments and dances carried out between 1973 and 1988 by the Institut national de recherche scientifique (INRS) in Butare and coordinated by Jos Gansemans,7 musicologist at the MRAC from 1967 to 2007. There has been no trace of these audiovisual archives in Rwanda’s cultural institutions since the 1994 genocide.8

5Shortly after the handover ceremony, Robert Masozera told the press that the sound archives would help Rwandan musicians who wished to draw inspiration from them and learn about the origins of their traditional music. He then concluded his speech with a commitment: “We will make them available in our library as well as in national museums where people can access them.”9 However, putting the archives online soon proved problematic. After an initial listening session, the RCHA authorities decided not to make them public in their then state, due in particular to ethnic references to “Hutu” and “Tutsi.” A selection had to be made from the archives before making them available to the Rwandan public. In 2023, the RCHA partners organized an exhibition on musical traditions at the Ministère de l’Unité nationale et de l’Engagement civique headquarters, where some sixty recordings were available for listening. A selection of seventeen hundred recordings was to be made available on the institution’s website.10

6The Share project’s musicological component involved both sharing audiovisual archives and producing and disseminating new ones. The RCHA was in need of audiovisual collection material and training in recording techniques for museum use. The project therefore began by setting up research and archiving protocols. The RCHA wanted to create an archive of Rwanda’s authentic tradition, i.e., musical repertoires falling into the two following categories: the Imbyino, translated in the index cards accompanying the recordings as “dance song,” “ritual music,” or simply “entertainment”; and the Indirimbo, listed as “lullaby,” “love song,” “historical song,” or “narrative song.” This process was to give substance to the post-genocide ideology of the “New Rwanda,” which enforces ethnic erasure and cultivates the idea of rwandité (Rwandanness) as a unified identity category (Plancke 2015).

7A first audiovisual collection training workshop was held in 2021 with staff from the RCHA, the MRAC, and the Brussels Musée des instruments de musique (MIM). The aim was to handle the newly acquired equipment and produce short videos, the first of which was shown at the sound archive handover ceremony.11 A second joint mission was launched in 2023. The aim this time was to produce a video on the re-appropriation of sound archives by contemporary artists. This video was to circulate on the various partners’ social media accounts, drawing attention to this shared cultural heritage.12 The Urugangazi troupe and producer Michael Makembe13 were chosen to be filmed on the RCHA’s recommendation. The videos were posted on the RCHA YouTube channel14 and then shared via the MRAC 15and MIM Facebook pages. Despite requests from artists and educational institution representatives, public access to the sound archives is still limited. Only a handful of artists have been given access and begun reinterpreting or consulting this shared heritage. One of the reasons for these initiatives being limited to the creation and documentation of sound archives is that the RCHA’s main activities are focused on communication and the development of cultural industries and not on sociological or musicological research into musical practices. There is no specific department dedicated to the recording and documentation of musical traditions.

Assessing the Dissemination of Sound Archives

8Putting musical heritages online, where intellectual property rights are shared between various actors and institutions, raises numerous questions, all of which bring into play and into question access rights and the duty to protect. Rwandan musical heritages in the MRAC date back to the second half of the twentieth century, a period when ethnicizing ideology was a reality that led to the 1994 genocide. References to ethnic groups established before the genocide are present in the sound files, as well as on the information pages that accompany them.

  • 16 The sharing of these archives was to take place within a project funded by the Direction générale C (...)

9Opening these collections to the public without a critical (re)reading of the metadata runs the risk of history repeating itself, but deleting information that no longer corresponds to current policies would be tantamount to rewriting it. The questions that arise from this complex situation flourish in the breeding ground of digital colonialism, where former colonizing countries have a hegemony of means to manage and diffuse knowledge about the cultural heritages of former colonized countries. The question of selecting and rereading sound archives has been handled directly by the RCHA within the framework of the Share project, resulting, however, in limiting the impact of sharing with the general public. A major failing on the part of the MRAC is that it did not hand over both the sound archives and the Rwandan archives held by the institution at the same time16 (field photos, notes, correspondence) and did not consider “the documentation explaining the audiovisual archives [to be] as important as the audiovisual material itself” (Nannyonga-Tamusuza 2015, 61).

10One of a cultural institution’s responsibilities is to make their collections relevant and representative to those who produce or consult them. Sharing cultural heritage must be carried out in regular collaboration with source communities. One avenue pursued by museums is support for artist residencies and creative research-action. Institutions open their collections to artists from source communities to make them “resonate” (Yip 2023) through these actions. Since 2008, the MRAC has been offering residencies to African or Afro-descendant artists to “study as well as work on and with the collections.”17 Artists have produced a wide range of works based on their consultation or the reuse of sound archives, but the historical source has always been the starting point for their artistic creativity. Individual initiatives have also emerged in recent years. In 2021, for example, artist KMRU delved into the MRAC’s sound library to produce a work titled Temporary Stored.18 In this work of sound compositions based on sampling ethnomusicological archives, he offers a new approach to listening in order to raise questions about their role in the intergenerational transmission of musical heritages. KMRU considers that museum archives are under-documented, with little public access, and that institutional interest in heritage preservation, focusing mainly on the materiality of sound, prevents any form of relationship with source communities. KMRU believes that the re-appropriation of institutional archives by artists would also be the best way to create a connection between past and present, between colonial times and contemporary societies. However, this approach, shared by other institutions,19 raises legal and ethical questions about the use of archives and the artist’s interpretation of them. Cultural institutions cannot shirk their duty to disseminate knowledge of cultural heritage, however difficult this may be to achieve.

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Bibliographie

Gansemans, Josef. 1973. “Recherche ethnomusicologique au Rwanda.” African Music 5 (3): 65–69.

Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Sylvia Antonia. 2015. “Written documentation of the Klaus Wachsmann Music Collection: Repatriating the Past to Present Indigenous Users in Uganda.” In Thomas Solomon, ed. African Musics in Context: Institutions, Culture, Identity. Fountain Publishers. 19–66.

Plancke, Carine. 2015. “Donner corps au “Nouveau Rwanda.” Cahiers d’études africaines 220: 711–38.

Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. Restituer le patrimoine africain. Philippe Rey.

Yip, Adilia. 2023. “Restitution of the Musical Instrument Collection through Participatory Creative Action.” In Sarah Van Beurden, Charles Didier Gondola, Agnès Lacaille, eds. (Re)Making Collections: Origins, Trajectories & Reconnections. MRAC. 255–64.

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Notes

1 The “Sharing Past and Future: Strengthening African-European Connections” conference was organized by the MRAC in collaboration with Belgium’s Institut royal des relations internationales and held at the Egmont Palace in Brussels. Accessed April 24, 2024. https://infosgrandslacs.info/productions/belgium-hands-over-sounds-and-songs-recorded-during-colonial-period; and https://www.africamuseum.be/en/research/news/sharing_past_and_future.

2 Accessed April 1, 2024. https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2017/11/28/discours-demmanuel-macron-a-luniversite-de-ouagadougou.

3 See the Dekkmma project, accessed July 2, 2024, https://music.africamuseum.be.

4 The instrument files were scanned in-house by the MRAC’s Digitization and Archive Department as part of the Digit digitization program funded by the Belgian Bureau de la Politique scientifique fédérale (BELSPO).

5 See the MIMO project, accessed July 2, 2024, https://mimo-international.com/MIMO.

6 The Scohy-Stroobants mission in 1954 for Radio Congo Belge; the studies carried out by Jacques Maquet and Denise Hiernaux-L’Hoest in 1955 for the Institut pour la recherche scientifique en Afrique centrale (IRSAC); and the work of R. P. Verwilghen carried out between 1948 and 1953 (Gansemans 1973).

7 A total of 1,023 recordings were made by Jos Gansemans during this period (source: MRAC archives).

8 During the missions I carried out as part of the Share project, only a few tapes were identified, but these were neither inventoried nor digitized.

9 Accessed July 2, 2024, https://guardian.ng/interview/almost-all-4095-rwandan-songs-we-received-have-not-been-heard-of-robert-masozera/.

10 As of June 2024, the selection of sound archives was not yet available online.

11 Michael Makembe personally produces sound archives of Rwanda’s musical traditions, which he uses in his musical creations. Accessed April 21, 2024, https://www.africamuseum.be/en/research/news/africamuseum_transfers_over_4000_sound_recordings_to_rwanda; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WWUlcjMOko.

12 The term “restitution” is deliberately avoided here, as the nature of the Share project was not to return (in)tangible heritage objects that had been wrongfully possessed but to pool sound archives co-produced by Belgian and Rwandan research institutions.

13 See the documentary Sounds of Home: A Musical Odyssey in Rwanda, directed by filmmaker Samuel Ishimwe for Al-Jazeera, accessed April 21, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onHzJHWrTiU. We also worked with producer Pastor P., who personally forms sound archives of Rwanda’s musical traditions, which he uses in his musical productions.

14 Accessed April 21, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6TbpxhdM3U.

15 Accessed June 11, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDbaJxLD9dE.

16 The sharing of these archives was to take place within a project funded by the Direction générale Coopération au développement et Aide humanitaire (DGD) and named “Rwanda Archives.”

17 Accessed April 23, 2024, https://www.africamuseum.be/fr/get_involved/artists.

18 Accessed June 25, 2024, https://kmru.info/.

19 Examples include the “Réveil des archives sonores” program at the Musée d’Ethnographique in Geneva and the “Unlocking Our Hidden Collections” initiative at the British Library in London.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Athanase Sebatunzi, inanga zither player.
Crédits MP.0.0.3216, collection MRAC Tervuren ; photo J. Gansemans, 1974 © MRAC Tervuren.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8659/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 224k
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Rémy Jadinon, « The Challenges of Sharing (Colonial) Sound Archives in Rwanda »Gradhiva [En ligne], 38 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2025, consulté le 15 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/8659 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1451m

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Rémy Jadinon

Chercheur en musique - Conservateur des collections musicologiques
Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale – Tervuren (Belgique)
remy.jadinon[at]africamuseum.be

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