oral history Archives - the Past Echoes Deep

New Project, New website!

By Jonna Katto on Thursday, December 21, 2023

My new research project (“Multiscalar gendered temporalities in southeastern African history: Oral voices, lived and inherited pasts, and the deep testimony of time in language”) studies the relation between individual lived time and the longterm and large-scale time of conceptual history.

The focus of the project is specifically on the deeper gendered histories of power among the Yaawo language communities in the cross-border region of present-day Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania in southeastern Africa.

The project proposes that examining different timescales side by side allows for more complex narratives about gender and power in African pasts and presents.

The project is funded by the Research Council of Finland 2023-2027.

Website of research project: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/gentempo-africa/

African history Female chiefs gender history methodologies Niassa oral history voice

New Article Alert!

By Jonna Katto on Sunday, October 1, 2023

Access the article here: https://doi.org/10.1017/hia.2023.4

Food History Mozambique’s liberation struggle oral history Polytemporality

By Jonna Katto on Monday, November 9, 2020

Food time

“Women’s memories of food offer insights into Mozambique’s liberation struggle

We don’t just taste food. Aromas, visual images, sounds and touch are equally part of our eating experience. Food also evokes feelings. We can experience it with joy but also with displeasure. This sensorily evocative power of food makes it an important site for remembering the past, which in turn influences our relation to food in the present.

There is much important literature in Africa that deals with food security and the biological necessity of eating. However, my research explores how food…”

Read the full article on The Conversation Africa

For a longer analysis of the polytemporality reflected in food memories see my recently published research article ‘Liberating Taste: Memories of War, Food and Cooking in Northern Mozambique’, Journal of Southern African Studies 46, 5 (2020): 965-984.

Both articles are open access!

archives oral history

Archive of voices

By Jonna Katto on Monday, June 17, 2019

For the past two weeks I’ve been digging into an exciting collection of oral history interviews. What makes the interviews so interesting for me is that they were conducted in 1981 and 1982 (so almost forty years ago!) in the same areas where I am currently doing oral history research into deeper gender history.

The 1981-82 project was led by historian Gerhard Liesegang, and he worked together with Teresa Oliveira, Mucojuane M. Vicente, and Manuel J. Bula (translating from Ciyaawo to Portuguese). Its aim was to reconstruct the history of this northern territory from precolonial times to the anticolonial struggle (1964-1974).

Interesting about Niassa is that it was relatively late, only in 1919, that the area was brought under direct Portuguese colonial control. Until then some of the Yaawo chiefs offered strong resistance against colonial expansion into their areas.