Book presentation « C’était bien à l’époque mais l’avenir iko sombre » – Daniela Waldburger

Why do former mineworkers in Lubumbashi (DRC) remember exploitative working conditions and measures to control their private lives with nostalgia? Building on their ‘objects of loss’, this book answers this question, foregrounding the voice of so-called ‘Départs Volontaires’. The study combines linguistics, anthropology, and archives research to explore what ex-mine workers regard as material and emotional ‘objects of loss’. The book advocates for a participatory research framework called ‘the baraza web’, which merges the researcher’s perspective with the standpoint of the ex-miners to create an alternative archive and to show that power relations within a research setting need constant questioning.

Daniela Waldburger is Senior Lecturer for Swahili and Lecturer for Linguistics at the Department of African Studies of the University of Vienna. Her book, published by Brill in March 2025 is available in Open Access: « C’était bien à l’époque mais l’avenir iko sombre » – Negotiating Nostalgia with and among Ex-Mineworkers in Lubumbashi (DRC) | Brill

This u:africa-talk took place as part of the 26th Afrikanist*innentag.