From 28 July to 5 August 2025, Project AfDevLives organized Sound–Place–Storytelling, a training workshop on sound-based approaches to qualitative research, hosted by Moshi Co-Operative University (MoCU) in collaboration with St. Augustine University of Tanzania (SAUT). Organized by Dr. Janine Häbel (Iscte), Dr. Yonatan N. Gez (Iscte), Dr. Godfrey Kweka (MoCU), and Dr. George Mutalemwa (SAUT), the workshop brought together thirty participants from across East Africa and Europe.
What followed was an in-situ experiment in engaging the afterlives of industrialization through sound and storytelling, and we are happy to share our experiences with you.

Project AfDevLives: The Afterlives of Development Interventions in Eastern Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique) is a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant based at the Centre for International Studies (CEI) at Iscte, University Institute of Lisbon (2022-2027). The project explores how development interventions’ representational and material remains are experienced, utilized, and re-appropriated by local actors over time, and how such active immanence of the past affects people’s life-worlds.

Why Sound? Why Moshi?

The purpose of the workshop was to examine new qualitative ways of experiencing and communicating post-industrial urban places and of bringing complex or hidden stories to life. In line with Project AfDevLives’ interest in phenomenology and affect, sound was introduced as a way of enticing experience “in situ”. 

Moshi, at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, was an ideal setting. For more than a century, it has been an important hub for coffee export and a center of Tanzania’s cooperative movement. The Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union (KNCU), founded in 1933, became one of the earliest and strongest cooperative unions in Africa. The town’s role as an industrial coffee export hub also drew significant investment, particularly from German and British colonial interests, but also from Indian and Arab merchants whose presence shaped Moshi’s urban and industrial landscape. This layered history of industrialization and deindustrialization is still apparent in the town today: from colonial factories, through the socialist Ujamaa era (1960s-1980s), to the later period of market liberalization. Some factories were nationalized, others repurposed. Some were eventually abandoned, while others continue to operate at reduced capacity.

Amid Moshi’s mix of humming factories and silent industrial spaces, the workshop invited us to look less and listen more, attuning our senses to sound as another way of engaging with industrial life. In particular, we were curious to witness whether our focus on storytelling would resonate with rich traditions of orality in East Africa. The use of audio-based methods inspired by audio walks was a fairly new experience for all of us, including the organizers, and early on in the process we established that “we are all learners”.

The Structure of Our Workshop

The workshop began with an introductory day at MoCU, where we set out the rationale and experimented with qualitative methods. Half the day was dedicated to audio-based exercises, which included open listening as well as a structured audio walk through the campus based on an interview that the organizers conducted with a retired professor. 

From there, the town became our classroom. For five days, participants worked in small and diverse groups to explore locations across Moshi’s centre, sites central to the story of (de)industrialization: the town’s railway station, the holdings of the KNCU, the coffee curing factory, the former cotton ginnery, colonial-time living quarters, the Small Industries Development Organization (SIDO) complex, the Kristo Mfalme Catholic Church, and old industrial centres along Ghala Road and Viwanda Street. Participants made contacts and observations, traced legacies, and tuned in to the routine and extraordinary sounds that animate these spaces. Each group then curated its own audio piece, weaving together field recordings, interviews, and creative narration into a walkable experience. 

Each day ended with debriefings, both in small groups and in plenary format, where emerging themes and challenges were shared, and additional needs, such as training in editing software, were addressed.

After a day of rest, we reconvened at MoCU for a two-day public symposium. The highlight was testing each other’s audio walks out in town and discussing the experience. On the second day, we were joined online by Babak Fakhamzadeh from walk · listen · create, who reflected with us on the limited reach of audio walks in the Global South and on their potential to move between art, advocacy, and research.

Curating Audio Walks

The nine groups’ audio walks turned out as diverse as the town itself. Some took the form of guided tours, carefully leading the listener from stop to stop. Others drifted into dreamlike narratives, inviting the imagination to wander in wonder. Some integrated testimonies from interviews, weaving personal voices into the soundscape. Others drew on online material from media sources, while yet others focused more on soundscapes such as machine sounds. Most outputs consisted of several sound spots, though a few unfolded as continuous, ambulatory stretches, or even as a single, immersive track. The question of outputs’ language, too, was a point of discussion: while most outputs were in English, some were in Swahili or in a mixture of the two. 

The in-situ reveal of others’ walks, which took place on the first day of the symposium, was characterized by excitement, especially considering the diversity of outputs. As participants skipped between locations across town, their colleagues’ recordings presented themselves like warm invitations, opening doors within a town that was new for many. 

Challenges and Reflections

Creating and sharing these pieces was not without its difficulties. To keep things simple, we opted to share audio pieces through a simple Google Drive. Platforms such as Echoes or VoiceMap can provide geolocated experiences, but they also require up-to-date smartphones and rely on reliable GIS signal and (oftentimes) roaming data, conditions that were not always available. Google Drive ensured basic accessibility across devices, though it came with its own limitations: without GPS guidance, the walks often required direction on-site from the group who created them. And because we opted, due to privacy concerns, to open the files for streaming but not for download, those with weaker internet signal sometimes still struggled to listen smoothly.

Other challenges emerged in the practice of walking itself. The constant background of traffic and street sounds made attentive listening difficult, with an advantage to those with high-quality noise-cancelling headphones, while uneven pavements demanded divided attention, sometimes leaving participants exhausted. Importantly, for many participants who were unfamiliar with Moshi, wearing headphones sometimes felt like quietly intruding into other people’s spaces. Street greetings were made difficult, creating unease with our own impoliteness. To mitigate these feelings, on-site interlocutors were sometimes invited to join the walks using extra equipment, and several of the groups shared their final results with their interlocutors either during the symposium or afterwards.

Another challenge arose from the political sensitivity surrounding (de)industrialization. Unlike in parts of the Global North, where exploring “lost places”, abandoned factories and derelict buildings, has become a hobby for urban explorers, access to such sites in Tanzania is tightly controlled. Guards and permits control access to fenced compounds, while local communities tend to associate outsiders’ interest in these spaces with future investment and jobs. This made our presence in such places the subject of curiosity and sometimes suspicion: people wondered what exactly we were doing there, and why we are so keen on recording. Many of the sites we explored were government-owned industrial spaces, and were especially sensitive in the run-up to Tanzania’s 2025 elections, when the national narrative of revitalization of local industries was being carefully shaped. Although the organizers secured official permits, groups often hesitated to bring external listeners into these compounds. We were also aware that, after the workshop, local inhabitants would likely be denied entry to these sites, undermining the installation of permanent, in-situ audio experiences. In response, some groups curated walks around and outside the industrial compounds, using sounds and stories recorded inside to give listeners a glimpse inside the gates. In this way, the audio pieces allowed listeners to engage with the town’s most prominent industrial sites and to sense something of their hidden histories through sound.

Overall, this experimental, and experiential, workshop seems to have inspired our participants into a new way of working with qualitative research. Multiple participants noted that this was their first time engaging with sound-based methods, and several indicated that they would like to continue to do so. At the same time, this mode of operation was not always easy. The ambitions of experimenting with sound-based approach meant compacting multiple moments, from ethnographic exploration to interviews to sound production and design of user experience, into a relatively short timeframe. The absence of prescribed objectives left some groups unsure of the workshop’s intentions, and ethical questions around ownership and copyright of recorded voices remain important for future such activities and workshops to address. Yet these very challenges became part of the learning process, highlighting both the fragility and the promise of listening-based approaches.

Walking Forward

This workshop showed us that sound-based methods hold much potential. In multiple cases, our interlocutors were keen to tell the story of a place, seeing the recordings as a way to preserve and share memories. This opens an avenue for more participatory engagement, where industries, cooperatives, or neighborhoods might tell their own stories, situating past experiences alongside future visions.

Furthermore, through some of the visitors in our symposium, we also recognized the potential of following traditions of orality rather than writing. Unlike academic texts, audio pieces can be created with, and shared directly by, non-academics, research interlocutors, local residents, or curious passers-by. In this sense, working with sound was not only a methodological experiment, but also an attempt to generate outputs that move beyond specialized scholarly writing and become tools for dialogue and reflection in everyday life. While we emphasized in-situ listening, the Moshi experience also invited us to consider how sound can cross over locked gates, literally bringing out stories, memories, and atmospheres of places that many residents live beside but never get to enter. In this way, audio becomes a bridge, connecting people with histories and spaces that remain otherwise out of reach.

Ultimately, Sound–Place–Storytelling was a reminder that cities are not only to be seen; they are also to be heard and to be experienced somatically. Listening differently opened up unexpected encounters, with places and with people. 

This text was written collectively by participants of the workshop: Yonatan Nissim Gez, Janine Häbel, George Mutalemwa, Godfrey Kweka, Angela Kronenburg García, Anna-Luisa Silva, Bahati Hussein, Berenike Eichhorn, Bikolimana Muhihi, Carla Bertin, Claire Médard, Consea Richard, Emmanuel Mhache, Eric Masese, Eunice Karanja Kamaara, Francis Kungu Ngure, Gileard Minja, Happy Shayo, Hellen Githogori, Kanti Kimario, Keren Kuenberg, Lena Kroeker, Manuel João Ramos, Manya Kagan, Melkizedeck Urio, Miguel Ramos, Octavian Mahamba, Odax Lawrence, Oliver Canada, and Orlando Nipassa.