Machine translation

(nmz) - People were amazed. Curiosity was satisfied. People enjoyed the "primitive exotic" at the people's exhibitions. A hundred years ago, no one questioned the "price" of the cultural goods on display from the German colonies and what the people presented had suffered. It is only recently that research has been carried out into colonialism. In Tübingen, Mèhèza Kalibani is interested in a particular facet of colonial plunder: he is studying the phonographic recordings of German colonial officials.

Mèhèza Kalibani studied German Studies at the University of Lomé. As a scholarship holder of the Adenauer Foundation, he continued in 2016 in "International History and Culture Studies" at the University of Siegen. Since 2019, he is a doctoral student at the Institute for History Education and Public History at the University of Tübingen. It was by chance that he came across the subject of his thesis. "About five years ago, I had to help a friend who was studying a historical record in a Togolese language," says Kalibani. It was the first time the cultural historian learned that such recordings of former colonial officials existed in the Berlin phonogram archives...