Conservation Community Archaeology and Archaeological Mediation at Songo Mnara Tanzania

Journal of Field Archaeology
ISSN: 0093-4690 (Print) 2042-4582 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjfa20
Conservation, community archaeology, and

archaeological mediation at Songo Mnara,
Tanzania
Stephanie Wynne-Jones & Jeffrey Fleisher
To cite this article: Stephanie Wynne-Jones & Jeffrey Fleisher (2015) Conservation, community
archaeology, and archaeological mediation at Songo Mnara, Tanzania, Journal of Field
Archaeology, 40:1, 110-119, DOI: 10.1179/0093469014Z.000000000109
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/0093469014Z.000000000109
Published online: 13 Jan 2015.
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Date: 17 October 2016, At: 09:18
Conservation, community archaeology, and

archaeological mediation at Songo Mnara,
Tanzania
Stephanie Wynne-Jones1, Jeffrey Fleisher2
1
University of York, United Kingdom, 2Rice University, Houston, Texas
During archaeological fieldwork at Songo Mnara, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the southern
Tanzanian coast, a storm caused the collapse of a graveyards retaining wall. The process initiated by the
rebuilding of that wall serves as a case study in addressing the dialogue among researchers, community
members, and national and international organizations concerning heritage. During the process of
rebuilding the wall, the Village Ruins Committee was called up by the Songo Mnara villagers as a
community voice to speak with external stakeholders and to access perceived opportunities to work with
UNESCO for financial reward. The committee led the rescue operation at the graveyard, yet was not always
recognized as part of the process of conserving the site. In describing the tensions among the hierarchy of
stakeholders at Songo Mnara, we explore the benefits and contradictions of international involvement with
marginalized communities who might have multiple competing interests. Our study also speaks to good
archaeological practice and the ways that we must seek to do community archaeology through recognizing
the efforts of local groups who need to forge their own paths to collaboration. The case of Songo Mnara is
an interesting example of how international heritage agendas, local historical memory and archaeological
research can intersect to strengthen community ties to, and investment in, the monuments of the past.
Keywords: World Heritage, community archaeology, Swahili, stonetown
Introduction
In June 2009 at the start of a field season at Songo
Mnara on the southern Tanzanian coast (FIG. 1),
heavy rains caused the collapse of the retaining wall
of a hilltop cemetery. The wall, built of coral blocks
and lime plaster, and surrounded a 14th15th century
mosque and associated graveyard, a complex structure unknown elsewhere on the Swahili coast. Songo
Mnara is a compact, densely-settled town site having
many standing remains (stonetowns) from the 14th
15th centuries A.D. Songo Mnara is one of many
traditional Swahili coral-built towns that dotted the
east African coast in the centuries before Portuguese
arrival (Kusimba 1999; Horton and Middleton 2000).
The cemetery in Songo Mnara was built at the edge
of a coral bluff, thus the collapse of the retaining wall
threatened the cemetery as it exposed the earthen fill
containing hundreds of burials (FIG. 2). This particular cemetery is important as the resting place of the
sharifs (religious leaders) whose graves still attract
offerings and prayers from local inhabitants. In the
Correspondence to: Stephanie Wynne-Jones, Department of

Archaeology, University of York, Kings Manor, York YO1 7EP, United
Kingdom. Email: stephanie.wynne-jones@york.ac.uk
110
Trustees of Boston University 2015

DOI 10.1179/0093469014Z.000000000109
rush to raise the funds and labor to save the cemetery

from devastating erosion and rains, a process began
that might be described as community archaeology, characterized by a variety of stakeholders
working together to achieve a common goal related
to heritage management (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and
Ferguson 2008a). The instigation came not from the
involved archaeologists or state parties but from the
residents of the nearby village of Kijiwe.
Here we discuss some of the issues that emerged
through this process of community archaeology,
and the differential engagement of various stakeholders with the tangible remains of the regions
history. Themes that have emerged from working in
this small region of southern Tanzania are of concern
to more general heritage discourse. Through collaboration with the villagers to save the cemetery, we
came to understand how much their engagement with
this United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage
Site was structured around a struggle for the
resources that they perceived in the ruins. Exposed
were the differing expectations of the villagers during
the reconstruction of the cemetery wall at Songo
Mnara. The villagers had an economic interest in the
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Wynne-Jones and Fleisher
Figure 1 Songo Mnara and the Kilwa archipelago with an

inset of the East African coast.
site, partly spurred by international interventions. This

does not mean they were uninterested in their past; in
fact, residents of the village maintained several historical traditions in connection with the ruins (Bacuez
2008), and the graveyard was a site of veneration and
commemoration (Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2012). Still
the standing ruins and the associated archaeological
remains were less crucial to local historical narratives as
understood by the international research community. We
consider this issue of differing objectives in the context of
the hierarchy of stakeholders at Songo Mnara, and each
groups relationship to the ruins. We highlight what
constitutes the local community as read through the
sometimes competing interests of the villagers who live
near the site, international heritage specialists, the
Tanzanian Antiquities Division, and UNESCO (Smith
and Waterton 2009; Waterton and Smith 2010; Watson
and Waterton 2010). Finally, we consider the role that
archaeologists might have as intermediaries between the
village community and the state agencies tasked with
overseeing the ruins themselves.
Songo Mnara and the Swahili World

Songo Mnara is a unique Swahili site because of the
quality and preservation of its standing architecture
(Garlake 2002). It is this along with the singular
features of the neighboring town of Kilwa Kisiwani
that has led to the inscription of the two towns as a
Conservation, community archaeology, mediation at Songo Mnara, Tanzania
Figure 2 Collapsed cemetery retaining wall at Songo Mnara,

with fill exposed.
single site (FIG. 1) on the UNESCO list of World

Heritage Sites. Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara
were separate but interlinked towns occupying
adjacent islands in the Kilwa archipelago. Songo
Mnara was built and inhabited during the efflorescence of the Swahili town building, A.D. 13001500,
and constructed in the grandest possible style,
echoing architectural developments at nearby Kilwa
Kisiwani. Kilwa is historically and archaeologically
better known, having been the seat of one of the most
powerful coastal sultanates from the 11th century
A.D. onwards. Kilwa gained fame and power by controlling the trade along the southeastern African
coast, in particular the gold trade emanating from the
Zimbabwe plateau (Sutton 1997, 1998). Kilwa also
has a much longer chronology, with the town dating
back to the 8th century A.D. (Chittick 1974); the
habitation of the island on which it sits has an even
greater time depth (Chami 2006). Chittick (1974)
conducted extensive archaeological research at Kilwa
Kisiwani in the 1960s; and shorter research campaigns were undertaken more recently (Chami 2006;
Matteru 1989; Fleisher et al. 2012).
In contrast, there is little historical data on Songo
Mnara since it is not mentioned in any documents
and nor does Songo Mnara appear to have been
visited by the Portuguese who had arrived at Kilwa
Kisiwani by A.D. 1505. Though the extensive ruins of
the site were mapped in the 1960s (Garlake 1966), only
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Figure 3 Conserved Friday Mosque at Songo Mnara.
limited archaeological testing had occurred until

recently (Pradines and Blanchard 2005). Current
archaeological research at Songo Mnara, begun in
2009, is aimed toward understanding ancient urban
life there and in Swahili towns more generally, moving
beyond their long-recognized function as ports of
Indian Ocean trade (Fleisher and Wynne-Jones 2012;
Wynne-Jones and Fleisher 2010, 2011). The conversion of the majority of Swahili people to Islam is
evidenced by mosques in Swahili towns from the 10th
century A.D. onwards, and the mosque (and related
cemetery complex) at Songo Mnara at the heart of this
essay is just one of six mosques and four cemeteries
that exist in the town of Songo Mnara alone.
Conservation and Research at Kilwa Kisiwani

and Songo Mnara
Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara have together been
a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981; they were
recognized as endangered only in 2004 (Abungu 2004).
By then, a restoration program was already underway
with funds from the World Bank and managed largely
by the French Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
This work, which took place between 2002 and 2005,
included conservation and restoration of the Friday
Mosque and Palace at Songo Mnara (FIG. 3). This
work was associated with a more substantial restoration program at Kilwa Kisiwani, including conservation of the Gereza, a Portuguese-era garrison, and the
Makutani Palace, the 18th-century seat of power in the
town. At the same time as this conservation work,
another project, funded by the World Bank (Marine
and Coastal Environment Management Project
[MACEMP]) led to the construction of information
signs at both Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara and
the high production value publication of a short book
about Kilwa written mainly for tourists (Moon 2005).
A series of smaller interventions have occurred since
that time, in response to the endangered status of the
sites including another MACEMP at Kilwa Kisiwani
and an ongoing program of work under the World
Monuments Fund. These projects at Kilwa and Songo
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Mnara have all focused on restoration and conservation

of the standing remains. Among the stakeholders, there
is an implicit understanding that conservation efforts will
assist in the preparation of the sites for tourism and
encourage greater numbers of visitors, which would
perhaps lead to local economic benefits. While economic
benefit is seen to be a result of the work, it is not
necessarily the goal of the international projects.
The opportunities for participation by local residents in the conservation work at Kilwa and Songo
Mnara have been variable, depending on the relative
proximity of each island to the mainland administrative center, Kilwa Masoko, as well as on the
proximity of island villages to the ruins themselves.
Around 9000 people live in and among the ruins at
Kilwa Kisiwani (Bacuez 2009: 7), inhabiting the spaces
between monuments where they have built houses and
installed small gardens. On Songo Mnara Island,
however, the villagers of Kijiwe do not live close to the
ruins since the modern village is spread along the
eastern coast of the island, about a 30-minute walk
from the site. The villages position is related to the
irrigated rice fields on the southern part of the island,
and a recent archaeological survey (Stoetzel 2011)
suggests that this occupation began in the mid-to-late
19th century. Although they live physically apart from
the ruins, the village residents pass them frequently on
their way to Sangarungu, the islands main boat
landing, located just north of the site, facing the
mainland coast. A fishing community was established
there, but most of the residents there are impermanent
and transitory, and locally regarded as unrelated to the
ruins, despite their proximity.
At Kilwa Kisiwani, Pierre Blanchard, the conservation architect who oversaw the French Embassy
project, trained several local workmen in the construction of coral and lime architecture and they have
carried on with this work under various funding
regimes via the Tanzanian Antiquities Division of the
Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism (henceforth, the Antiquities Division) (Giese 2011). Some
residents of Songo Mnara Island gained experience of
working with the structures under the guidance of
supervisors brought in from Kilwa in 2004, and
Kijiwe villagers provided labor and found employment as camp managers and guards. It was during
these conservation efforts that the first significant
archaeological testing took place at the site of Songo
Mnara (Pradines and Blanchard 2005), as well as the
initiation of an ethnographic study of the islands
communities (Bacuez 2001, 2008).
Experts and Communities: UNESCO, the

Antiquities Division, and the Village Ruins
Committee
In Tanzania, research and conservation are carried
out under the auspices of the Antiquities Division,
which is responsible for the management and preservation of over 500 publicized cultural heritage sites.
Its primary role is linked to the conservation of those
sites, as enshrined in a 1964 article of Tanzanian law,
allowing for the creation of areas of cultural heritage.
This article of law was initially extremely prohibitive in
its proscription of community involvement; indeed,
local communities were often seen as a threat to
historical remains. The interest that local groups might
have in their built past was only recognized in 2008
with a revised Antiquities Division policy that
advocated local participation and the integration of
heritage protection at regional, national, and international levels. It is now recognized that conservation
and heritage agendas in Tanzania require articulation
among stakeholders at all levels (Mabulla 1996, 2000;
Masele 2012). In the Kilwa region, Antiquities
Division policy is carried out by the local officers
located in Kilwa Masoko (FIG. 1). They make visits to
the islands and ensure that the ruins are being
respected. Kilwa Kisiwani is naturally visited more
often as it is so close to the mainland (ca. 20 minutes
by boat) and because conservation issues arise more
often as the villagers live, work, farm, and graze their
livestock among the ruins. Comparatively, the
Antiquities Division officers rarely visit Songo
Mnara because it is ca. 1.5 hours away by boat.
A major concern at both sites is the vegetation that
flourishes among the ruins during the rainy season
from AprilJune. A key moment in the site management cycle is the organization of vegetation clearance
across the sites, which is achieved by a workforce of
local residents armed with scythes, paid for by the
Antiquities Division, and organized via the Village
Chairmen and the Chairmen of the Village Ruins
Committee (VRC) (see below). The disbursement of
funds for clearance and the recruitment of staff for
this is therefore the main interaction between the
Antiquities Division and the villagers at both sites,
although minor repairs and management concerns
are dealt with in a similar way throughout the year.
The relationship is therefore sporadic and fluid, the
workforce membership can vary across different
tasks.
A VRC was formed on both Kilwa Kisiwani and
Songo Mnara as a means for the villagers to engage
with the government and international organizations
that came to work at each site. There is no set size of
the VRCs, and they are each fully managed by the
local village. One person, a village elder, is selected by
other elders as a Chairman, and the committee is
populated by a half dozen senior men, representing
different village families and religious leaders, including the local Imam. In our discussion with the committee on Songo Mnara, both through the Chairman
and with committee members, they indicated that
they were acting in the interests of the entire

community. The committees were formed in conjunction with the Antiquities Division, but on Songo
Mnara the VRC is perceived as independent, a
conduit to voice concerns about village involvement
in research and tourism. This has been less true at
Kilwa Kisiwani, where the VRC is seen as an
extension of the Antiquities Division. The Kilwa
Centre, an NGO on Kilwa, has been set up by
younger residents to pursue their own interests.
During the conservation campaigns of 20022005
on Songo Mnara, village residents felt excluded from
both the work and the ongoing financial opportunities, and sought to gain employment and be
involved in the expected expansion of the tourist
industry on the island. The formation of the VRC
was an attempt by the villagers to constitute
themselves as legitimate stakeholders in the governance of the Songo Mnara ruins. The VRC may be
seen as an attempt by the residents of Kijiwe to
challenge what Smith (2006: 29) had called an
authorized heritage discourse that emerges from
the international and state groups that manage and
control the site. As Smith (2006: 4) argues, such
Western discourses naturalize certain narratives and
cultural and social experiences, by focusing attention
on materiality and monumentality and privileging a
particular form of professional engagement with
heritage sites. In the case of UNESCO World
Heritage Sites, engagement with local communities is
through officials in state parties who are authorized to
manage those heritage resources. UNESCO thus
monitors and manages World Heritage Sites in
Tanzania through the National Antiquities Division,
based in Dar es Salaam. Locally this includes the
Antiquities Division office in Kilwa Masoko, staffed
by well-trained managers who have degrees from the
University of Dar es Salaam.
Thus, international heritage organizations, e.g.,
UNESCO or MACEMP, function on the ground in
the Kilwa archipelago through state parties. The
reinforcement of Tanzanian governmental institutions is
through international support and is crucial to their
ability to widely conduct heritage management. To be
sure, the protection of Swahili sites has challenged
conservationists and Antiquities Division officials in
Tanzania and Kenya for decades (Kusimba 1996;
Schmidt 1996; Wilson and Omar 1996; Abungu 2006).
Archaeologists have described the destruction of Swahili
cultural heritage, both through the actions of the state,
corrupt land sales, and the local communities themselves,
e.g., dismantling ruined buildings, building anew on sites,
and farming publicized archaeological ruins (Wilson and
Omar 1996). Therefore a strong and effective Antiquities
Division is important in ensuring the long-term protection and development of coastal cultural heritage sites.
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This structure relies on the state parties, themselves

often distant from the sites they manage, to work with
local communities. The UNESCO Convention
Considering the Protection of the World Cultural
and Natural Heritage (1972: Article 5) asks state
parties to endeavorto adopt a general policy which
aims to give the cultural and natural heritage a
function in the life of the community and to integrate
the protection of that heritage into comprehensive
planning programmes. However, few World Heritage
Sites achieve this goal, and more commonly local
communities are critical of the management of the sites
from above and experience few benefits, unless
designation of World Heritage status translates into
increased opportunities through tourism. Even then,
many local communities are left without voices within
the administration of the sites since they must rely on
state parties to represent their interests (Hitchcock
2002; Evans 2002). More than 10 years ago, Ndoro
and Pwiti (2001) made a cogent case for including local
populations in southern African heritage management. More recently, they and their colleagues
(Chirikure et al. 2010; Chirikure and Pwiti 2008) have
found that much greater attention has been paid to
local communities at World Heritage Sites in Africa,
but found the implementation of programs related to
the local communities has yielded mixed results
(Meskell 2007, 2012). Ndoro and Pwiti (2001: 39)
argue that one of the challenges is that a community
may include a number of different populations, or no
population at all. What is less often discussed is how
the UNESCO World Heritage Site designation itself
establishes a hierarchy of stakeholders, including state
parties, heritage managers, and communities of people
who live near and among heritage sites (Fontein 2006).
In the Kilwa region, World Heritage Site status has
not translated into any specific plans, and while local
residents interact sporadically with Tanzanian
Antiquities Division officials, they often remark that
the state parties are as distant as the international ones.
Because World Heritage status in Tanzania is managed
through the Antiquities Division, it creates a relationship between UNESCO and the state party in which it is
incumbent on the Antiquities Division to continually
reaffirm its expert status. This is accomplished through
site visits and tours, in which external consultants
accompany the Antiquities Division officials to the
sites, and then report on their findings (Abungu 2004).
Local village committees are not commonly part of
these site visits. UNESCO has commissioned studies,
such as that by Bacuez (2009) that attempt to remedy
this divide by recording local histories and opinions
relating to the ruins but these investigations tend to be
disconnected from the heritage reports organized by the
Antiquities Division. The creation of a VRC is seen by
the local communities as an opportunity to challenge
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the top-down authority of the Antiquities Division, and

to be represented within a set of institutions that are
seen as having access to resources that they desire
(Evans 2002).
The local Antiquities Division office communicates
with the VRCs on Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo
Mnara Islands and hosts yearly meetings in which
Antiquities Division officials explain the work that
has been planned or completed. We helped facilitate
one of these meetings at the end of our field season in
2011 which was well-attended by elders of the
community and their families. At this meeting there
was much discussion about how the activities of the
Antiquities Division staffand foreign conservationists and researcherswere unaligned with villager
interests in the site. The villagers wanted to know
about more permanent work opportunities, related to
both tourism and site conservation, and to understand what effects the development of Songo Mnara
as a tourist site would have (both positive and
negative) on their local community. As previously
reported by Bacuez (2009: 39), villagers are afraid to
start up small businesses [related to tourism] and to
fail to obtain benefits. Many villagers say that they
cannot afford to start their own businesses alone.
They are facing shortages in staple food and the
natural resources are declining.
There have been a number of recent efforts to
engage heritage issues at Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo
Mnara, and to work towards better consultation with
the local communities. Much of this is framed by the
desire of the Tanzanian Antiquities Division to
increase tourism at the sites, with the belief that
greater tourism will help increase local revenue and
alleviate poverty on the islands. Bacuez (2009) has
documented the negative attitude that many residents
of the islands have toward tourism and international
organizations. They argue that tourism tends to be
monopolized by a few well-connected individuals,
that there are too few tourists to make it worthwhile
to devote resources to them, and once the sites are
inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List they
do not belong to us feeling that [tourism is only]
a good deal for UNESCO and the State (Bacuez
2009: 36). The general lack of tourism in the Kilwa
regionwith only 1000 foreign visitors a year
(Bacuez 2009: 26)is a problem. This situation
differs substantially from that at other World
Heritage Sites where local communities either feel
overwhelmed by or marginalized from the tourist
industry. At Kilwa Kisiwani, the designation of
World Heritage Site status has done little to promote
or encourage tourism, and has only led to significant
funds being invested in conservation programs and
training and infrastructure for Antiquities Division
officials. It is this dissatisfaction with the effects of
World Heritage Site status that many local residents

express.
In sum, as the state party representative for
UNESCO, the Tanzanian Antiquities Division works
to retain authority and control over heritage sites,
especially World Heritage Sites like Songo Mnara.
When acknowledged, the relationship between the
Antiquities Division and local villages (now mediated
through VRC) tends to be one in which the
Antiquities Division attempts to add the local
communities, as an afterthought, to their management procedures. As Smith (2006: 3738) discusses,
such an additive process, in which heritage practitionerssimply add the excluded and assimilate them
into the fold rather than challenge underlying
preconceptions can often lead to little more than
gestural politics. In this case, the main challenge is
that, for international researchers and conservation
organizations, working with the government defines
local engagement, creating a situation in which the
recognition of community voices could undermine
the Antiquities Divisions presumptive claim to speak
for Tanzanian heritage. This creates a substantial
motivation for the maintenance of exclusivity among
employees of the Antiquities Division. The voices of
the Kilwa regions inhabitants, as recorded at meetings and focus groups, are thus taken into account in
the creation of an official local voice which comes
from the national office in Dar es Salaam.
These issues came into sharp relief in 2009 as we
worked with local community members and the VRC
to temporarily secure the cemetery wall at Songo
Mnara and to apply for funds to rebuild it fully. The
VRC was the first to respond to this restoration
work, as the Antiquities Division was sympathetic
but did not have funds to pay either local workers or
its own conservation team. As the states representative to UNESCO, the Antiquities Division was
required to take action if monies were to be secured.
In the aftermath of the rescue operation, the
official conservation process moved forward,
exposing the way that various stakeholders were
positioned within relations of power in a hierarchy,
despite the interactions of the VRC. In drafting an
emergency funding application that would pay the
Antiquities Division conservation team to rebuild the
retaining wall (replacing the coral bulwark built by
the villagers), distinctions between experts and their
expertise emerged. This laid bare both the distinction
between who was the local community and who
had the power to make decisions about the future of
the ruins (Smith and Waterton 2009: 3031). On the
one hand, there was the local conservation team,
employed by the Tanzanian Antiquities Division, and
on the other there were the foreign conservation
architects and specialists at UNESCO who made
decisions about funding. This process completely

excluded the villagers of Kijiwe, who could not be
written into the grant as they had neither the
necessary expertise in conservation practices nor the
administrative skills to call upon resources from
UNESCO. Emergency Grants are for small projects,
ones that do not require evaluation at the level above
the regional UNESCO office. It is the structure of
these grants, then, that determines who is considered
to be an expert. Though the local Antiquities
Division office (in conjunction with the on-site
conservation team) can instigate an Emergency
Grant, anything more substantial must originate with
experts at the national office in Dar es Salaam, taking
many months to complete. What we witnessed,
therefore, was a disconnect between the desire for
action from the VRC and its inability to call upon
resources from external funding agencies because of
the status of Songo Mnara as a World Heritage Site.
The Village Ruins Committee: A Community

Stakeholder and Partner?
Until 2009 we were unaware of the VRC on Songo
Mnara with all our local organization and information initially coming from the Antiquities Division,
including our permission to conduct archaeological
work. We learned about the existence of the VRC
from villagers as we negotiated for laborers and camp
staff for our archaeological fieldwork. Bacuez (2009:
39) reports that the formation of this committee (and
a similar one on Kilwa Island) was encouraged by the
local Antiquities Division to assist the Department
in its tasksmainly maintenance and monitoring of
the sites. However the committee members suggest
that it had been formed locally in direct response to
the 2004 conservation program as a means to engage
with the various government officials, international
bodies, and researchers who came to the site. Mr.
Ndowe, the committee Chairman, said its objectives
were less about assisting the work of the Antiquities
Division and more about finding ways to access the
resources they saw flowing into the conservation and
research campaigns. Until 2009, those goals had not
been realized; the committee served only as a point of
contact for the Antiquities Divisions work at the
ruins.
The VRC has been crucial to our own research,
helping to coordinate local interviews to document
oral histories, providing local perspectives on the
ruins, and coordinating the logistics of employing
local workers. Working with local communities has
long been part of our research strategy. In the past we
have benefitted immensely from the input of local
knowledge in locating sites. We have benefited from
local stories that are known about those areas and
from assistance with the manual labor of excavations.
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Working with people from local villages is standard

practice in eastern Africa, with good practice ensuring that local voices are heard when it comes to
interpretation, particularly in the presentation of the
results of research in Swahili, and the creation of
materials for schools and museums (LaViolette 2004;
Mapunda and Lane 2004).
When the cemeterys wall collapsed on the second
day of our field season in June 2009, the VRC became
crucially important to our efforts to save the burials
which now lay exposed to the elements. It is by
coincidence that we happened to be on the site when
the wall fell, pushed down the slope by a particularly
heavy rainstorm, and leaving the seaward side of the
cemetery unprotected from further damage. We were
able to call the regional UNESCO office in Nairobi,
Kenya and begin the process of applying for
emergency financial assistance, which was later
awarded. At the same time that we were communicating with the Antiquities Division in Dar es
Salaam and urgently seeking UNESCOs help, we
discussed possible solutions with the Chairman of the
VRC, Mr. Ndowe. Through these discussions we
developed a plan to use the fallen rubble to construct
a temporary bulwark against further damage. This
was necessary because the collapsed wall had retained
a six-foot bank of earth containing burials at the top
of a coral bluff (FIG. 2). Over 50 villagers, men and
women, volunteered their time to move coral blocks
over the course of two days to construct the bulwark.
We provided food and water for the workers, which
was the only payment they took. Their engagement
was motivated by several concerns. First, the graveyard, with its ritually important burials, was a sacred
place for many and everyone recognized the importance of protecting human burials from collapse into
the mangrove swamp. Second, the villagers saw an
opportunity to become directly involved in conservation and sought assurance that any future work
involving funding would provide employment for
them. This was assured by compiling a list of all the
volunteers and depositing it with the local Antiquities
Division office. In many ways this was the first
realization of VRC goals. By acting as a group they
were able to cement their ties with the site and reap
the rewards of international interest in it. Until this
time, the VRC had not been recognized as an agent in
the process of conserving the ruins, and had remained
peripheral to state and international parties.
It was this incident of the collapsing wall that
created a situation in which community archaeology
took shape through the agency of the VRC and its
largely economic interest in the ruins. Therefore, it
was the members of the VRC, rather than us, who
were the community archaeologists; they found ways
that local inhabitants could contribute their skills to
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the larger project of understanding and protecting the

regions heritage. This experience and our ongoing
relationship with the VRC is akin to what ColwellChanthaphonh and Ferguson (2008b: 11) call participation rather than collaboration in that the
goals of the project were developed independently
with limited (but not full) stakeholder involvement.
What is interesting in this case, however, is that the
local community itself was the driver of participation
rather than the archaeologists or international
organizations. This form of local empowerment
and action emerged as a response to the level of
international interest in the site. It serves as a
challenge to the ways that heritage discourses are
often configured, as we discuss below.
Archaeologists as Intermediaries
As researchers, what we can do that the local
community cannot is to act as mediators between
local communities and national/international organizations. In this particular case, we were able to
mediate between the VRC, the Tanzanian Antiquities
Division, and UNESCO to secure local community
support. We received the necessary information from
the Antiquities Division to apply for UNESCO
emergency funding, and drafted an application. All
of this became possible because the VRC was active
on the ground, and willing to devote time and energy
to move the process forward. What became clear is
that international interest in Songo Mnara and Kilwa
Kisiwani has a direct effect on local practices relating
to the sites, with new stakeholders seeking not only
to become a part of the heritage process, but to
challenge the way the authorized heritage discourse
has marginalized them. Unfortunately, UNESCO is
not set up to take account of the local structures.
Even for us, who are trained in writing and applying for
grants, the bureaucratic infrastructure of UNESCO is
baffling; for the residents of a village on Songo Mnara,
it is unassailable.
The incident of the collapsed wall taught us an
important lesson as researchers in the region and
inspired us to improve our practices, making us take
our responsibilities seriously in regard to local
heritage and community partners. We had already
attempted to build collaborations with international
agencies involved in conserving at the site, but from
2009 onwards we have sought to bring the village
with us, involving the VRC in our negotiations. A
plan by the World Monuments Fund to apply for
funds from the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural
Preservation to extend the conservation efforts at
Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara (now funded) led
us to actively engage in the discussion among
stakeholders. We wanted to be involved in the
conservation process to ensure that it would not
Figure 4 Planning meeting at the British Institute in Eastern

Africa, Nairobi, Kenya, with representatives of UNESCO, the
Tanzanian Antiquities Division, Kilwa Culture Centre, the
Songo Mnara VRC, Abungu Okello Consultancy, and the
authors.
have a negative impact on archaeological deposits. To

this end, we organized a meeting of stakeholders at the
British Institute in Eastern Africa, Nairobi in January
of 2010, including representatives from: the Tanzanian
Antiquities Division, the World Monuments Fund,
UNESCO, the proposed conservation team, the VRC,
and the Kilwa Culture Centre (FIG. 4). Discussions at
this meeting led to a Memorandum of Understanding
(MOU), signed by the stakeholders and the Tanzanian
Antiquities Division. The MOU specified procedures
to follow in our various projects at the site and in
acquiring the communitys input and outlined how we
would best represent their interests.
During the course of this meeting we heard more
about the communitys priorities with regard to the
site of Songo Mnara. These largely mirrored the
feelings expressed by Kilwas inhabitants, although
Songo Mnaras isolation from conversations, and
their comparative poverty, heightened the stakes for
these participants. Mr. Said Yahaya Juma, Executive
Officer of the Songo Mnara VRC, attended the
Nairobi meeting and expressed the villagers desire to
be involved in work at the site. This differed from the
ways that locals are normally seen to benefit, with a
future tourist industry predicted as a major outcome
of work at the ruins. As we have mentioned, villagers
on Songo Mnara are wary about investing in this asyet unrealized potential. They are very aware,
however, of the money that currently moves onto
the island as salaries and resources for research and
heritage work. The VRC seeks the active involvement
of the villagers in these opportunities, and it was this
motivation that drove their engagement with the
cemetery wall project.
Although the meeting should be regarded as a
success, it was also a context in which the tensions
between competing local interests became apparent.
As stated above, the Kilwa Culture Centre, for
example, was a group set up independently by

Kilwa residents who felt their economic ambitions
were not well-represented by the Kilwa VRC or by
the Antiquities Division. The Culture Centre sought
international investment in small businesses and
training for local guides. By reaching out internationally, such as via an email campaign to archaeology departments worldwide, they have established
themselves as a dominant voice on Kilwa Kisiwani
island, while the VRC there is seen here as roughly
coterminous with the Antiquities Division itself. The
meeting also further exposed the challenges in
creating contexts in which all stakeholdersand not
just international and national expertscan be
present at discussions over heritage and its future.
Organizing the meeting was difficult. Heritage consultants with UNESCO and with the state bodies ask
for higher per diem rates to attend meetings than our
research-oriented funding can cover, while village
representatives attend for the cost of bus fare.
Nonetheless, the resulting World Monuments Fund
project involves a great deal of investment in
community infrastructure, and their relationship with
the VRC, shaped by the MOU, has resulted in
villagers who are more actively engaged in the
activities of the World Heritage Site than ever.
Conclusion
The denial of local agency is certainly an unintended
consequence of international heritage projects, which
empower state parties over local communities. A
truly local engagement is difficult to achieve.
Nevertheless, UNESCO involvement was the catalyst
for this community to see a benefit in preserving the
past that goes beyond its own historical linkages. It is
notable that our experience with the VRC directly
contrasts with the situation encountered by the
anthropologist employed by the World Bank/
French Embassy project. He concluded that the
communities had no engagement with their pasts or
at least with the town sites that were their physical
manifestations (Bacuez 2008). Indeed, local groups in
the Kilwa area are often seen as separate from the
past inhabitants of the sites, as the 18th century slave
trade in this area had a serious effect on local
demography. It has been argued that the current
inhabitants have little sympathy for the slave owners
who inhabited the stonetowns (Pradines and
Blanchard 2005). This was not our experience in the
Kilwa region, and Mr. Ndowe and other members of
the community were a rich source of stories about the
ruins and the peoplepast and presentwho lived
and worshipped there. This connection was reaffirmed by the formation of the VRC, although this
should not be seen as a unified interest group. For
example, when negotiating over the excavation of
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burials, we met with leaders of the Islamic community here, whose interests in this site were not always
aligned with those held by the VRC. This situation
positioned Mr. Ndowe as a mediator for our interests
in the local community, as opposed to being their
mediator at the regional level.
So, while UNESCO sets up a system which
effectively excludes local communities, they simultaneously allow local communities to see the possibilities of their own sites and monuments. It is in this
context that archaeologists can be most effective as
mediators between local and international bodies.
Since we tend to have sustained contact with a region,
unlike the heritage organizations that simply make
assessment visits to the ruins, there are opportunities
for many different kinds of engagements between
archaeologists and the members of the local community. In the context of the collapsed wall, that
engagement meant bringing the skills of local people
to the forefront as they created a practical solution
that we could not have achieved alone, nor could
UNESCO or the Antiquities Division have acted so
quickly. In this instance, the primary goals were
preserving heritage and conservation, and further
interaction with the VRC assisted our ongoing
research on social memory and memorialization as
a feature of the built environment at Songo Mnara,
both during the life of the town and for contemporary residents. It should be noted that in this example,
we are not dissolving the boundaries between
archaeological and local expertise. Although in other
contexts communities have been directly involved in
site interpretation (McDavid 1997, 2002), at Songo
Mnara that is not the communitys goal. The
reception of our work was extremely positive as the
people we worked with appreciated the interest in
their history and were excited by the new insights we
were able to provide. Our archaeological research is
not seen as something that will transform or even
deepen their past narratives; our findings are easily
incorporated into their pre-existing understandings of
the Swahili world. Songo Mnaras inhabitants simply
want to be involved in the process by which we come
to know their past and not to be excluded from the
benefits of the wider worlds engagement with the
site, which often has the potential for local financial
gain. The local community sees archaeological
research as providing support for an archaeological
past already known, in the same way that the
construction of a retaining wall supports the physical
remains of that past in the form of buried ancestors.
For us, this project taught us new ways to be
archaeologists within the community. The interests
of local people can and should drive community
archaeology.
118
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Acknowledgments
The Village Ruins Committee of Songo Mnara and
their Chairman, Mr. Ndowe, are owed the greatest
thanks for their insights and their assistance with our
work. We would also like to thank Stephen Battle of the
World Monuments Fund, Pierre Blanchard, Donatius
Kamamba of the Tanzanian Antiquities Division, and
Mohammed Chidoli and Revocatus Bugumba of the
Kilwa office. The British Institute in Eastern Africa and
the Global Heritage Fund provided financial assistance
for the meeting in Nairobi. We would also like to thank
Meredith Chesson for encouraging us to write up these
experiences for an American Anthropological
Association conference session on community archaeology in 2010. Three reviewers provided helpful
criticism and insight.
Stephanie Wynne-Jones (Ph.D. 2005, University of
Cambridge) is Lecturer at the University of York. Her
work focuses on the archaeology of the Swahili coast of
East Africa and particularly on the role of material
culture in that society. She is co-director of the Songo
Mnara Urban Landscape Project, exploring the use of
space at this 14th16th century stonetown.
Jeffrey Fleisher (Ph.D. 2003, University of Virginia)
is Associate Professor at Rice University, Houston,
Texas. His research on the ancient Swahili has focused
on the role of rural and non-elite people in the context
of urban development and the use of material culture in
the construction of power and authority. His current
research at Songo Mnara focuses on the social uses of
open space.
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