KUMBUKUMBU

Kumbukumbu (“memory” in Kiswahili) is a long-term, collaborative, audio-based research & creation project, initiated in 2021 by Koenraad Ecker (Berlin, Germany) and Haldi Okudheyo (Aru, DRC).

With Kumbukumbu, we aim to investigate and evoke life in the North-East of Congo under Belgian colonial occupation ; the epistemic murk created by colonial dislocation ; and the long shadow of colonial rule on soul, spirit and soil.

Our methodology consists of working together with local communities and historians to translate and contextualise the deep and highly codified meanings embedded in colonial-era sound recordings dating from 1908-1960. In doing so, their revelatory, subversive power is revived : suddenly, piercing through the hiss and crackle of colonial noise, their voices are here, close to us, bearing witness, unlocking a space of memory long thought to have been shut.

This form of collective deep listening becomes a strategy to conjure up ghosts ; to find a space in historiography for the implicit and the emotional ; and to create a living, human intimacy with a past often distinguished by a stubborn, suffocating silence.
Perhaps we might even find a restorative power in this practice.

Since 2023, Kumbukumbu have been invited to present their work at renowned academic institutions and symposia such as Humboldt Institut (Berlin), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Vienna), the ICTM Study Group on Historical Sources (Brussels) and the Symposium of the Study Group on Sources and Archives for Music and Sound Studies / MUSA (Berlin).

In 2025, Kumbukumbu contributed to a new temporary exhibition at the MRAC/Africamuseum (Tervuren, Belgium) on colonial propaganda entitled "The Congo Panorama. Colonial Illusion exposed".

A documentary entitled "Ugurumash", based on Kumbukumbu's ongoing work, is in currently in production.

This project has received financial support from the Flemish Ministry of Culture, the Berlin Senate and Goethe Institut.

Other partners in the past have been the MRAC (Tervuren, BE), the INMC (Kinshasa, DRC) and Nyege Nyege (Kampala, Uganda).

3 EXAMPLES OF SONG TRANSCRIPTIONS