The Gramophone: 20th Century Missionaries and their Legacy on African Musical Representation

At the turn of the 20th century, as colonial-driven scientific and cultural incursions advanced into Africa, gramophones became colonial tools, not only recording African music but also shaping its legacy. This paper explores the intersection of missionary activity, colonialism, and African musical identity in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where missionary-run record labels, such as the Basel Mission’s UTC, played a pivotal role in categorizing African music. These sound recordings, celebrated as representations of “authentic” African culture, also benefited colonial interests, sidelining Indigenous expressions and reshaping the cultural landscape through debates of what style should be institutionalized to define the colony.

Drawing on Kofi Agawu’s critique on the representation of African music in Western scholarship (1992), this study interrogates how colonial sound archives institutionalized an aural hierarchy that distinguished “modern” (Europeanized) and “traditional” (African) music, reinforcing European superiority. I employ a comparative analysis of three musical styles: art music, traditional music, and popular music, to examine how colonial powers in the Gold Coast, motivated by religious, economic, and educational ideologies, framed African musical identities.

Moreover, this paper contributes to the ongoing debates on the decolonization of African sound archives by exploring how these collections can be reinterpreted and re-signified through collaborative efforts with the very communities whose music they represent. Yet, the gramophone, rather than being a neutral recorder of sounds, was used as a tool for sonic domination. Drawing on missionary archives, this paper illustrates how historical sound archives offer access not only into the past but also into the evolving understandings of African identity and cultural heritage. However, there are African histories to be explored that resonate against the many gaps in historical records. For this, I use Erin John-Williamson's concept of “archival imaginary” (2023) to examine the silences in colonial archives and the legacies of these.