Echoes between Cameroon and Germany

Show notes

In the last episode of season 5, Jan Dammel is in conversation with musician and sound artist Elsa M’Bala. They talk about the 2021 performance parcours "Eigensinnige Leben" in Berlin's Treptower Park, Cameroonian anti-colonial organisers in Berlin during the interwar period, such as Victor Bell, and what it means for Elsa to work with sound archives in European universities and museums. Learn more about her ongoing project Kribi Archives, which makes ethnographic recordings of Cameroonian music accessible in Kribi, and her general investment in creating listening spaces.

In Conversation With

Elsa M'Bala

Elsa M'Bala, internationally known as A.M.E.T., is a Cameroon-born sound artist, performer, and experimental music creator recognized for her innovative approach to live podcasts blending DJ’ing, field recordings, spoken-word interviews, and immersive sound design. Her work has been showcased at leading global art institutions, including Akademie der Künste Berlin (DE), Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’Art Contemporain (LUX), Dak’Art Biennale (SEN), and Gessnerallee Zürich (CH). She also produced the official trailer for the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Her recent projects include to host listening sessions with the Ass Niang collection and to direct the Kribi Archives in Kribi, Cameroon.

Website
Instagram @elsa_mbala


References

Earlier episodes referenced: “Lower Frequencies” (Feb 2023) and “Mit und gegen das Archiv” (Feb 2025)

Mendi + Keith Obadike (blacksoundart.com) awarded the first Ogene Art Prize to Elsa M’Bala in 2021 (press release)

On Performance-parcours Eigensinnige Leben

The performance-parcours Eigensinnige Leben. Eine Performance auf den Spuren Schwarzer Aktivist:innen im Berlin des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts [A performance tracing the footsteps of Black activists in early 20th-century Berlin], premiered in September 2021 in Berlin’s Treptower Park.

Concept and Script: Joel Vogel and Vincent Bababoutilabo, Performers: Elsa M’Bala, Jeanne-Ange Wagne, Maïmouna Coulibaly, Mmakgosi Kgabi, Osman Osman, Rebecca Korang, Serge Fouha.

Find the 10 min video essay and texts (in German by historian Laura Frey) on early 20th century Black activist in Berlin such as Martin Quane a Dibobe, Bernard Epassi, Joseph Bohinge Boholle or Maria Diop (née Bell) and on Afrikanischer Hilfsverein and Liga zur Verteidigung der N*rasse on the project website.

Eigensinnige Leben was preceded by decolonial audio walk zurückERZÄHLT (premiered in 2020 in German, available also in French and German since 2021), which tells the stories of 106 children, women and men from the former colonies who worked as contract workers to the colonial exhibition in Treptower Park in the summer of 1896. (English website)

The audio walk is based on historical research by Laura Frey, Yacine Riebel, Mihir Sharma and Joel Vogel which drew partly on the findings in the ongoing, permanent bilingual exhibition zurückgeschaut | looking back at Museum Treptow (information)

Victor Bell and the Lautarchiv

Elsa mentions two exhibitions on Duala Manga Bell: “Hey Hamburg, do you know Duala Manga Bell?”. April 14, 2021 til April 7, 2024 at MARKK museum Hamburg and “Il était une fois la naissance du / Once upon a time the birth of the Staat Kamerun 1884 – 1914”, October 30, 2024 til February 28, 2025 at Musée National, Yaoundé.

The Humboldt University’s Lautarchiv, now housed in the Humboldt-Forum, holds four recordings, made by Diedrich Westermann in February 1934, in each of which Victor Bell sings a song. They are called: „Lied der Fischer (LA 1331)“, “Wiegenlied” (LA 1332), “Lied der Schwimmer” (LA 1333), and „Arbeitslied“ (LA 1334).

• Biography on Victor Bell, written by historian Johanna Niedbalski, on platform Kolonialismus Begegnen (2024)
• Nepomuk Riva: „Du rufst mich noch „einen Sklaven“! Selbstbewusstsein und politischer Protest in den Kameruner Aufnahmen des Berliner Lautarchivs“, in: Riva (Ed.), Klangbotschaften aus der Vergangenheit. Forschungen zu Aufnahmen aus dem Berliner Lautarchiv, Aachen 2014, pp. 157-225.
• Further Reading on the Lautarchiv: Irene Hilden, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archiv. Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive’s Acoustic Legacies, Leuven 2022.

In his 2014 article, ethnomusicologist Nepomuk Riva argues, based on conversations with musicians and linguists (such as Valère Epee) in Cameroon, that Westermann did not understand the Duala language while he was recording Bell nor that one song (“Lied der Schwimmer”) was not sung in Duala. Riva furthermore argues that “Lied der Fischer” “in fact is not a harmless fishermen’s song, but a song from the period when Cameroon was affected by the transatlantic slave trade” (Riva 2014:215) translated by J.D.) in which an enslaved African man expresses his wish for revenge against the white enslavers. Overall, Riva reads Bell’s choice of songs as a critical comment on, and act of resistance against, systemic racist discrimination in Germany in 1934.

Kribi Archives

Instagram @kribiarchives

Elsa M’Bala / Maria Ellendorf “Shifting Focus: Collaborative Approaches in the Kribi Archives Project”, Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vol .150 No. 2 (2025) (Online)

Elsa mentions the musicologist Kofi Agawu (Professor at CUNY Graduate Cener, New York City)

Listening Sessions featuring the Ass Niang Collection

Listening Session including conversation with curator Ibou Diop in July 2024 at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (information and video recording)

Listening Sessions on Cashmere Radio (#1 February 2024; #2 April 2024, #3 July 2024)

Credits

Sounds

• The excerpt featured in this episode of the sound piece made by Elsa M’Bala for Eigensinnige Leben in 2021 makes use of the recording “Arbeitslied” (LA 1334), Lautarchiv, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Excerpt of track for second edition of Kribi Archives – listening space, April 2026 by Elsa M’Bala, production: Aurelien Bethuel Tseo Olendja

Visuals
Photo: Arthur Hermann

Podcast Info
Curation and host for Season 5
Jan Dammel, Postdoctoral Researcher
Podcast Founder
Dr. Layla Zami, former Postdoctoral Researcher, FU Berlin
Producer
Freie Universität Berlin, Collaborative Research Center Intervening Arts
(SFB 1512 Intervenierende Künste, TP B05)
Funded by
German Research Society (DFG)
In Cooperation with
Eufoniker Audioproduktion
FU Berlin, SFB 1711 Affective Societies