“Taswira” in the Archive
On the Afterlife of Television Images in the Postcolony
By Andrei Siclodi
The structure and dynamics of the world we live in are informed by a economically driven mindset to an unprecedented degree.1 After its steady rise since nineteenth-century industrialization and the demise of the communist project at the end of the 1980s, capitalist expansion has practically conquered the entire world with its ideological stamp. This expansion is inextricably linked with technological progress, which not only serves as the foundation of the capitalist project but also manifests as the irresistible promise for the future. In parallel, colonialism ensured that African countries—dominated by European states until the 1960s—experienced a technological transfer, which has formed the basis of their present economic and cultural development and the network between former colonies ever since. This basis was anchored in the local and social structures under colonial or protectorate rule and has been continuously renewed in the form of development aid to this day.2 A new form of colonialism evolved that no longer depended on violent rule and exploitation but rather on the economic influence on the respective ruling class in the countries. In order to sustain such influence the capitalist mindset provides the ruling class with media technologies, first and foremost television and the Internet, with the aim to spread its own ideology and thereby reproduce itself—an expansive model of governance, which, despite all crises, appears to be successful for the time being. Under the guise of inevitable modernization, the guiding doctrine of an economically connoted rationalism pervades all spheres of life by unconditionally forcing its inherent rationalist thinking. As a consequence, the fields of influence of existing local knowledge economies are strongly repressed, often to the point of their extinction.3 In more favorable cases local knowledge is combined with “new” knowledge, and a “creolization process”4 takes place. This process manifests both on the level of everyday actions, language, and the individual identity formation as well as on the organizational level of state institutions, which have to adhere to the mandate of establishing and maintaining a governance in keeping with a Western European nation state model. Such a form of “creolization” is intrinsically connected to the technological conditions of capitalist power that promote it. It is neither balanced nor neutral, for it has a functional purpose imposed from the outside, which, however, must not become recognizable as such. And it should produce rational subjects and organizational forms that can be easily integrated into a global market. But, like any logic, the capitalist logic of rationalism can also become inconsistent and contradictory where it is forced upon existing thought patterns, which originated from a different, non-economistic type of social awareness. The newly introduced rules and structures can then prove dysfunctional and their rationality a trap. A television archive in a postcolonial African country, whose contents and condition exemplify political, economic, and linguistic questions of “creolized” image production and archiving, illustrates how such breaks and contradictions materialize.
In the 2012 short film A Third Version of the Imaginary5 by Benjamin Tiven we watch a man searching for a specific item in a film archive. With a slip of paper in his hand, the archivist, a “person of color”, walks the narrow hallways between metal shelves packed with light and dark gray boxes. He stops here and there, carefully inspecting spots where he perhaps could find what he is looking for. But what he hoped to find does not seem to be there. An archive is, by definition, the paragon of systematization and order, but the one here somehow does not easily disclose its structure or logic. Time and again the archivist searches for a potential hint, grabs a box from the shelf, reads the information on it, opens it, briefly examines the content, then closes it and puts it back. After several attempts he keeps two boxes in his hands, quickly sifts through the shelves for another, and finally gives up the search and goes into a locked room in the archive. There he unpacks a 16 mm film projector and, more or less in vain, tries to play a film roll that he had found in this room.
What was the archivist looking for exactly? It cannot be the analog film he tried to play: The boxes on the archive shelves were too small to contain a film roll. The audio track of the film provides the needed hint. While the archivist searches the narrator unfolds a story, in Swahili, about the fate of lost images. They were part of the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) archive, the Republic of Kenya’s (now partially privatized) public broadcasting station.6 Initially the TV broadcaster captured its image material on analog film, which was eventually deemed too expensive, and then video replaced 16 mm film as the information carrier. Video, however, is a medium that is not only easy to reproduce but also easy to overwrite. And so it happened that many images, likely for cost reasons, were overwritten after their broadcast in order to make place for the images of the coming weeks and months. “Video is an amnesiac medium. […] Video made the image cheap, but time expensive,” tells the narrator. “For an image to survive it had to be remarkable, it had to show us our world in a magic, unrepeatable way.” But who decided if an image fulfilled these requirements? And according to which criteria? This is, as the short film seems to suggest, not so easy to determine. It was likely the same protagonists, who—as we learn later in the course of the film—also strictly forbade the artist to show excerpts from the archived films in his own film. This restriction, this ban on reproducing images, ultimately proves irrelevant as the archivist, despite numerous attempts, fails to play the 16 mm film. The projector strikes, the film shakes and rattles, and its images remain hard to decipher to the very end.
In simple, calm images A Third Version of the Imaginary tells a multilayered story about the political fate of electronically reproducible images under “creolized” conditions. The short film illustrates what it means to subject a national moving images archive to the austerity paradigm of capitalist ideology. In the film we do not learn anything in particular about the historical development of the archive itself, for example, when the change from celluloid to magnetic tape occurred, or how long the transition from the old to the new medium lasted. But it becomes all the more clear that this archive has forfeited its contemporary political relevance—because in 2012, when the short film was made, its digitization and corresponding improved cataloging were not an issue yet.7 Hence, we are dealing with an archive that has become “historical”, whose future development, whose growth has apparently come to a standstill with the rise of digital television technologies. The historical value of its stored video films is founded on two levels: First, in their genuine function as visual testimonies of certain events in the country’s history, which are considered meaningful, worth being preserved. Second, as testimonies of a selection process, whose rules and logic can be ascribed to the only plausible explanation, namely the politically prescribed austerity by the ruling regime. The resulting shortage of information carriers likely forced the responsible persons at the broadcasting station to recycle existing cassettes and, thus, also make inevitable decisions about the contents: Which are worth preserving? Which events must remain archived, which not? But such decisions would actually oppose the underlying idea of an archive to collect and preserve preferably all cultural testimonies of a predefined territory or the production of an institution. As soon as an artifact has found its way into the archive it must stay there, its unscathed continued existence ensured. At this breakpoint between a cultural preservation impulse and economic regulation the paradox of archiving in a “creolized” context comes to light: The archive provides images that—through their very presence, by the fact that they have escaped being overwritten—testify the contingent nature of society’s collective memory. The contingency begins to unfold at the end of the transition from the “old” medium celluloid to the “new” medium video, when the archive can no longer physically grow due to economic constraints. Its growth can only be simulated, the prerequisite being the now technically feasible, discrete overwriting of the information carrier. The administration of the archive now has no choice but to take into account, above all, the representation of the ruling class as its direct superior. The entire rest of the archive material is potentially up for elimination. Hence, “technological progress” not only facilitates a more cost efficient production of images but also their swift, irretrievable extinction. Easy reproducibility, once viewed as an advantageous quality of electronic media, now takes on a dialectic power that can quickly shift in a negative direction.
Wolfgang Ernst rightly pointed out that archives should not only be read in terms of their historiographical function. Even though they can be regarded as part of cultural memory, they should not only be associated with the policy they originate from, rather they should also be understood alone as a manifestation of a political practice, which defines its own regularities and rules and exhibits a certain independence.8 Accordingly, the selection of images in the KBC archive would be the consequence of an archive policy of self-regulation, which can—but does not necessarily have to—comply with the original political mandate.
But what was the original political mandate of the KBC archive? As an integral part of the KBC its fate has always been linked with that of the broadcasting station. The history of the Kenyan television station correlates with those of other former colonies in Africa. At about the same time as the Republic of Kenya’s declaration of independence from the British protectorate in 1963, the BBC subsidiary KBC, which had already existed since the end of the 1920s, was nationalized and continued as a television station under the name “Voice of Kenya”. In the transition from the colonial to an independent government one of the highest directives was to sustain structural continuity: The continuation of a broadcasting institution, once established under the flag of colonialism, went, along with the introduction of television technology, hand-in-hand with an economic-political securing of the hegemony via a consortium of US-American, British, and Canadian companies and investors.9 At the end of the 1980s Voice of Kenya was named KBC once again; the mandate as a public service broadcaster remained. As Kenya does not have a national archive for audio-visual media to this day,10 the administration of the now 90-year-old KBC archive is still conducted by the institution. A 2009 study already assessed that the KBC archive was struggling with a number of problems, such as the obsolescence of the archived media, outdated inventories, limited space, or the lack of personnel trained in restoration and preservation of archival materials.11 These structural deficits could be resolved with appropriate financial provisions—but they do not seem to be within reach.
Hence, the policy of the KBC archive can only manifest under massive restrictions. It unfolds within the coordinates of an economy of time, which is closely connected to the material conditions of the recording media. In comparison to celluloid film development, the more “progressive” video recording technique, with its close historical ties to television, might have simplified the running production of images for the respective broadcasts, but at the same time it radically shortened their lifetime. The Occidental logic of historical valorization through documenting, collecting, and preserving, which the archive was based on, thereby becomes obsolete. Although the KBC archive still fulfills its genuine function, it also reveals gaps in a systemic sense. “The gaps are the archive,”12 writes Wolfgang Ernst, pointing out the inherent dialectics of the archive, the necessity of a concrete absence, which facilitates the formulation of a historical a priori of the archive on the level of discourse in the first place. No archive in the world can be considered “complete”. The “contained absence” can manifest in different ways: It can, for example, be interpreted as a “passive absence” that emerged at a certain point in time because no one was aware of the potential significance of an artifact. But it can also be understood as an “absenting that is an act of violence”.13 In our case the two manifestations mutually constitute and produce one another, whereby they decisively inform the reality conditions for potential statements of the archive.14
So the gaps in the KBC archive tell an own story of consuming and discarding, a history of obliteration, a history of violence. They remind us that their fate corresponds with the historical conditions under which their medium once emerged from: the conditions of war—because before television became a affair for the masses it was an instrument of warfare. “But the high-tech medium of television is the only one among all of these optical media that functions according to its own principle as a weapon. For this reason, it would not have risen to world power without World War II,”15 Friedrich Kittler states, referring to the development of optical feedback loop mechanisms by the Deutsche Wehrmacht and the British Army. In the 1930s, before the war broke out, television had already made first rudimentary steps in civil use; especially in authoritarian and dictatorial governed European states, it had already served as a propaganda medium. But not until the war was the technology modified into a weapon, a high-resolution remote-control system for radar or rockets, and finally as a means to realize self-guided missiles.16 The medium television grew largely out of warfare; its latent connection to violence remains intrinsic to this day—within and outside of its native territory. Even when its name might sound technical-descriptive and thereby harmless in a European cultural context, in other cultural spheres its interpretation is always connected with associations rooted in the local linguistic milieu. Thus, also in Benjamin Tiven’s short film the question arises, which term might best describe television in Swahili. It turns out that this question must be asked against the backdrop of a much more profound problem, as there is not even an equivalent for the word “image”:
In Swahili, a drawing is “kuchora”, a photograph is “picha”, cinema is “sinema” and video is “video”. But there is no naturally occurring word for just image. The image is an imported concept, a foreigner’s concept. In Swahili, an image can not exist without its medium. Perhaps we come closest to image in the word taswira, which can mean the sense of vision itself, or a glimmering mirage that one sees but doesn’t believe. Taswira can mean a visual lie of thought shared by a group. […] Taswira is also the shared impulse toward violence that unites a crowd just as it irrupts into a riot. Here too, it is a thing seen or felt by anyone at the same time, upon which they all agree without discussion. Taswira is an image whose technological medium is the mind.17
Hence, the word “taswira” stands, in general, for imaginary conceptions that only arise in an individual’s mind but at the same time are of a collective nature and primarily associated with negativity and violence. In this light, the word is an appropriate description for television, for the ephemeral nature of its images, which only solidify in the memory of the viewers. As an electronic medium, television has the technological capacity to conjure an immaterial visual presence, which, on an external level, exists only for the very moment the medium produces, transports, and displays the image, but thereafter it can persist in the memory of the recipients for an indefinite period of time. This quality makes the medium particularly well-suited as an instrument of ideologization. Just as colonial violence was replaced by economic colonialiality, the violence of the medium transformed into a dominance through ideological agency. In connection with the postcolonial project of modernization in the now independent African states, the respective television networks assumed the role of legitimization machines via image production, images which should present the government’s achievements to the masses.18 This type of image production, however, proved to be largely redundant, as it mainly showed how the ruling elite, first and foremost the presidents and leaders of the single political party KANU (Kenya African National Union), advanced the modernization of the country. Infrastructural projects such as bridges, plants, or factories were initiated non-stop with the symbolic gesture of a groundbreaking or cornerstone ceremony, finished building projects with a festive opening.19 A distinct television reportage aesthetic emerged; its main feature was the precisely clocked, nearly endless repetition of the activities of the people in power. These images exhibit a peculiar ambivalence: On the one hand, they tried to achieve a high documentary standard by capturing the country’s relentless modernization progress. On the other, they depicted ceremonies or ceremonial dramatizations of procedures that all followed the same pattern, which also influenced the image and narrative structure of the reportages. The repetition, the interchangeability in form makes this footage not just testimonies of the presented events, rather, with their blunting effect, they become testimonies of processes of political ideologization. Because their daily transmission had both an informative and a sedative function: The masses should be kept psychologically in a never-ending time loop of progress. This time loop is now frozen in the archive, as the KBC archive is filled with such recordings that escaped being overwritten.20 While this visual monotony of the exercise of power was preserved, other, perhaps more aesthetically appealing images were destroyed. We will very probably never learn what they once represented. Their absence, however, bespeaks the precarious state of the remaining images, the risk that, under adverse circumstances, they might share the same fate. In the postcolony the electronic archive seems to be a particularly fragile entity.
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1 Colin Crouch, The Knowledge Corrupters. Hidden Consequences of the Financial Takeover of Public Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).
2 Cf. Pablo Quintero, “Entwicklung und Kolonialität,” in Kolonialität der Macht. De/Koloniale Konflikte: Zwischen Theorie und Praxis, eds. Pablo Quintero and Sebastian Garbe (Münster: Unrast, 2013), 93–114.
3 Cf. Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983), 73–93.
4 On the “creolization” term used here, see: Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, (New York: Routledge, 1996).
5 Benjamin Tiven, A Third Version of the Imaginary, 2012, digital video, 12:00 min.
6 See: “Everyday Static Transmissions,” a discussion between Benjamin Tiven, Brian Larkin, and Tavia Nyong’o, May 13, 2014, https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/everyday_static_transmissions/#title-page (accessed on November 1, 2018).
7 Benjamin Tiven states: “One reason I initially tried to get access to the KBC archive was that I’d been told it was being digitized. In fact, it is not. But if it were, and all materials were catalogued, the archive could generate a lot of revenue, as it has a lock on visual records of the first four decades of the country. Digitization could also expand KBC beyond the realm of television and keep the network relevant.” Ibid.
8 Cf. Wolfgang Ernst, Stirrings in the Archives: Order from Disorder, trans. Adam Siegel (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 1.
9 Nyongesa D. Wafula, “Kenya Broadcasting Corporation in a Liberalized Market Economy: The Need for a New Model for Public Service Broadcasting,” October 2005, http://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke/bitstream/handle/11295/95936/Wafula_Kenya%20Broadcasting%20Corporation%20In%20A%20Liberalized%20Market%20Economy%20The%20Need%20
For%20A%20New%20Model%20For%20Public%20Service%20Broadcasting.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed on November 1, 2018).
10 See: “Towards a (National) Kenya Audio Visual Archive,” outcome document for proceedings, compiled by Joseph Basil Okong’o for The Archival Study Group, under the auspices of The African Woman and Child Feature Service (AWC), 2009, http://www.awcfs.org/dmdocuments/Conference%20Outcome%20Document.pdf (accessed on November 1, 2018).
11 Ibid., 12
12 Wolfgang Ernst, Stirrings in the Archives, 13 [emphasis added].
13 Ibid., 14.
14 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (London: Routledge, 2002), 70-74.
15 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 215–216.
16 Ibid., 217–218.
17 The quote is transcribed from the subtitles in Benjamin Tiven’s short film.
18 See Brian Larkin’s statement in “Everyday Static Transmissions” with reference to the situation in Nigeria, which can be compared to that in Kenya.
19 Ibid.
20 Benjamin Tiven in “Everyday Static Transmissions”.