Yvonne Chioma Mbanefo tells us about her engagement with Igbo audio recordings as part of her involvement with the [Re:]Entanglements project. Born in London, she grew up in Enugu, Nigeria from the age of six, where she was taught the Igbo language by her grandfather.
Having worked in digital media and Higher Education and coordinated the Igbo Conference for ten years, she has been listening to the recordings made in by Northcote Thomas in Igboland more than a hundred years ago.
Yvonne tells us about the range of recordings including songs, chants, and folktales as well as of musical instruments and compares them to the photographs made at the same time. She suggests that some recordings suggest a degree of suspicion about the recording process, as well as about Thomas’ collecting activities, but that in other cases people performed for the wax cylinder.
While some recordings include critique of colonial government and Europeans, Yvonne suggested that at times translators were selective in what they made known to Thomas. She discusses the “bread crumbs” left by African ancestors in the collections, and what we can make of them today.
Yvonne ends the conversation by reflecting on the losses of spiritual knowledge associated with the adoption of Christianity, her anger about this, but also continuities in language and practice that continue in the present.
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