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Apart from army registers, some (often anonymous) photographs and the files of anthropometric examination, the involvement of thousands of African soldiers in WWI and their presence in POW camps in Europe seems to have left few traces in European archives. Vis-à-vis a mass of autobiographic texts on the Great War, written by Europeans and Americans, there are very few published accounts of African soldiers that would allow for their historical experiences and views to be included in historiographies of WWI. A collection of sound recordings produced with African prisoners of war in German camps by a group of German linguists, musicologists and anthropologists between 1915-18 offers a notable documentation of their presence. Yet, similar to the anthropometric registration, these recordings were not designed to accommodate the soldiers’ accounts, but to create a collection of language recordings. If these cannot be considered as ‘authentic voices from the past’ and unmediated accounts of WWI, how do we understand and theorise these hitherto untranslated voice recordings, their form and content?\ud\udThis essay understands the recordings not as ‘voices’ but as echoes, that is, as mediated, often effaced reverberations of accounts of the self and the war. The notion of echo in this essay grapples with issues of extraction, attenuation, limitation, distance and distortion, or outright effacement, that is the result of the form and the mediation of those speech acts, the belatedness of listening to them, as well as, the gaps in meaning and intelligibility the recordings entail. By conceptualising the recorded voices and their translation as echoes, I seek to understand the status of the recordings, the effects of this linguistic practice and gain a sense of the situation in the camps, so as to position these subaltern articulations in their mediated, distorted form as part of the colonial archive

Echoes of the Great War: The recordings of African prisoners in the First World War