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

Abstract

This study intends to trace and think through a particular sequence of loss involved in creating and keeping phonographic historical records. As a piece of writing, it attempts to “uncontain” the waxen Ediphone and Dictaphone cylinders that form part of the Kirby Collection at the University of Cape Town. In this process of scratching for the sounds on these shells, and sounding out some of the vicarious and ulterior meanings invested in appraising ethnographic sound recordings in the archive, even the activity of listening will sometimes stand in the way of seeing sense here: while the cylinders are indeed tangible in the archive, they are and do no longer sound as they were intended to. They might be deemed technically unworthy of archiving, but the legacy of colonial and apartheid state power echoing through archives of institutional and national heritage in South Africa can complicate making judgements on cassation to a point of indefinitely suspended indecision. Non-sounding or excessively noisy sound carriers comprise archival items that are almost mysteriously tangible and can be read as a powerful metaphor for a postcolonial condition in which an ideological apparatus pursuing information retrieval threatens to mechanically and institutionally perpetuate itself. Might these cylinders’ very lack of usefulness in this regard serve to memorise those subaltern, sounding bodies that were sacrificed in the project of modernising Africa?