African Heritage Challenges: Communities and Sustainable Development

GLOBALIZATION, URBANIZATION AND
DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA
African Heritage
Challenges
Communities and Sustainable
Development
Edited by
Britt Baillie · Marie Louise Stig Sørensen
Globalization, Urbanization and Development
in Africa
Series Editors
Ebenezer Obadare
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS, USA
Caroline Wanjiku Kihato

University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa
Garth Myers
Urban International Studies
Trinity College
Hartford, CT, USA
Martin Murray
Taubman College
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
Ann Arbor, MI, USA
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Britt Baillie · Marie Louise Stig Sørensen
Editors
African Heritage
Challenges
Communities and Sustainable
Development
Editors
Britt Baillie Marie Louise Stig Sørensen
Wits City Institute Department of Archaeology
University of the Witwatersrand University of Cambridge
Braamfontein, South Africa Cambridge, UK
Globalization, Urbanization and Development in Africa

ISBN 978-981-15-4365-4 ISBN 978-981-15-4366-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1
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Contents
Heritage Challenges in Africa: Contestations

and Expectations 1
Britt Baillie and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen
Managing Africa’s Anthropocene Environment
Needle in a Haystack? Cultural Heritage Resources

in Designated Nature Environments of Southern Africa 47
Susan O. Keitumetse
African Cultural Heritage and Economic Development:

Dancing in the Forests of Time 63
Paul J. Lane
Heritage and/or Development—Which Way for Africa? 103

Webber Ndoro
v
vi Contents
Communities and the Quotidian
Mega Developments in Africa: Lessons from the Meroe

Dam 127
Shadia Taha
Heritage and Sustainability: Challenging the Archaic

Approaches to Heritage Management in the South African
Context 157
Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu
The Antimonies of Heritage: Tradition and the Work

of Weaving in a Ghanaian Workshop 181
Niamh Jane Clifford Collard
Transformation as Development: Southern Africa

Perspectives on Capacity Building and Heritage 201
Rachel King, Charles Arthur, and Sam Challis
African States and the Transnational Development

Agenda
The Culture Bank in West Africa: Cultural Heritage

and Sustainable Development 235
Mathilde Leloup
Exhibition Making as Aesthetic Justice: The Case

of Memorial Production in Uganda 265
Kara Blackmore
Modern Nostalgias for Sovereignty and Security:

Preserving Cultural Heritage for Development in Eritrea 297
Christoph Rausch
Contents vii
Epilogue: Whose Heritage, Whose Development? 331

Chris Boonzaaier
Index 345
Notes on Contributors
Charles Arthur has worked extensively as a professional field archaeol-

ogist in the UK, Ireland, South Africa, and Lesotho. He completed his
doctorate at the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford in 2018.
His thesis explored hunter-gatherer engagement with place and time in
the early Holocene of Lesotho, southern Africa. Between 2008 and 2012,
he directed major excavations and surveys in advance of the Metolong
Dam, Lesotho. Together with other colleagues from the Lesotho Heritage
Network, he is committed to training the first generation of archaeolo-
gists from Lesotho and finding new ways to practice archaeology that
prioritizes community interests.
Britt Baillie is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Wits City Institute,
University of the Witwatersrand and a founding member of the Centre
for Urban Conflicts Research, University of Cambridge. Previously,
she was an Affiliated Lecturer at the Division of Archaeology Univer-
sity of Cambridge; Director of Studies for Archaeology and Anthro-
pology at Peterhouse; Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the Capital
Cities Institutional Research Theme, University of Pretoria; a Post-
Doctoral Research Associate on the Conflict in Cities and the Contested
ix
x Notes on Contributors
State ESRC funded research project; an AHRC funded Early Career

Researcher on the Cambridge Community Heritage Project; a Research
Fellow at CLUE VU University of Amsterdam and a coordinator of
the Cambridge Heritage Research Group. She co-edited Locating Urban
Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Everyday (Palgrave Macmillan)
with Wendy Pullan in 2013.
Kara Blackmore is an anthropologist and practicing curator who works
on postwar reconstruction and forced migration across East and Southern
Africa. She has spent the last decade in Uganda working with cultural
institutions, governments, academia and the private sector to create inno-
vative exhibitions. To reflect on her curatorial practice, she has under-
taken a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Her 2019 exhibition ‘When We Return: Art, Exile and the Remaking of
Home’ was the culmination of three years of collaborative research and
artistic practice in Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and
the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Chris Boonzaaier studied anthropology at the University of Pretoria,
South Africa. His postgraduate studies focused on customary law among
the Tsonga in South Africa. From 1997 to 2018, he was the program
manager of a degree course specializing in Heritage and Cultural Tourism
at the University of Pretoria. In this field, he has published in accredited
journals on topics such as community-based catering services for tourists,
community dynamics in sustainable tourism development, rural people’s
perceptions of wildlife conservation, community perceptions of tourism,
and community-based ecotourism management. From 2009 to 2011,
he was also a member of an international project, the African-European
Academic Alliance for Sustainable Tourism, Environmental Sustainability
and Poverty Reduction, which focused inter alia on tourism, conserva-
tion and development in Eastern and Southern Africa. Prof. Boonzaaier
retired in 2018.
Sam Challis is a senior researcher at the Rock Art Research Insti-
tute, University of the Witwatersrand. He lectures undergraduates in
global hunter-gatherer and rock art studies, and supervises graduates—
one of whom comes from the Metolong training program. He started
Notes on Contributors xi
the Matatiele Archaeology and Rock Art program in 2011 at Charlie

Arthur’s suggestion, in order to redress the neglected history in the
Matatiele region of the former apartheid ‘Transkei’ homeland. System-
atic survey has since revealed over 200 archaeological and rock art sites
and prompted two excavations and sixteen graduate dissertations. All
of this is undertaken in collaboration with the Mehloding Community
Tourism Trust, who assist research and suggest the community members
who might join the training program. Sam also writes about the inter-
pretation of the rock art of the San and creolized raider groups of the
colonial-era.
Niamh Jane Clifford Collard is a social anthropologist and researcher
based in London. She has a background in fine art and art history, and
her Ph.D. (SOAS, 2017), for which she won the Royal Anthropolog-
ical Institute’s Sutasoma Award, was an ethnography of life, learning,
and work among young men in a Ghanaian textile workshop. She has
conducted research in government, and since 2018 has been a post-
doctoral researcher at SOAS working on an ERC funded project looking
at the politics of mobility, infrastructure, and climate change in South
Asia. Her interests are at the intersection of the anthropologies of work,
youth, knowledge practices, and emerging studies of the future.
Susan O. Keitumetse is a research scholar in cultural heritage and
tourism at the University of Botswana’s Okavango Research Institute. She
undertakes applied research in areas such as the Okavango inland Delta
World Heritage Site and the Kalahari Desert. Her work strives to illus-
trate the specific relevance of cultural resources in the broader environ-
mental conservation for sustainable development field. She is the author
of a pioneering volume titled African Cultural Heritage Conservation and
Management: Theory and Practice from Southern Africa (Springer, 2016).
She is currently working on developing a guide for practitioners, scholars,
and local communities in African contexts using the Community-Based
Cultural Heritage Resources Management (COBACHREM) model.
Dr. Keitumetse obtained an M.Phil., 2001 (Archaeological Heritage
Management and Museums) and Ph.D., 2005 (Sustainable Development
and Archaeological Heritage Management: Local Community Participa-
tion and Monument Tourism) from the University of Cambridge after
xii Notes on Contributors
winning two scholarships under the Cambridge Commonwealth Trusts.

She is the associate editor of the Environment, Development and Sustain-
ability journal and an expert consultant and facilitator for the UNESCO-
ICH section. Dr. Keitumetse has served for six years as a board member
of the Botswana Tourism Organisation.
Rachel King is a lecturer in the Institute of Archaeology, University
College London and an honorary researcher at the Rock Art Research
Institute, University of the Witwatersrand. Previously, she was the Smuts
Fellow in African Studies at the Centre of African Studies, University
of Cambridge, and a research affiliate at the McDonald Institute of
Archaeological Research. Her research addresses histories of archaeolog-
ical thought and the intersections of heritage and natural resource extrac-
tion in Southern Africa. She recently published Outlaws, Anxiety, and
Disorder in Southern Africa: Material Histories of the Maluti-Drakensberg
(Palgrave Macmillan).
Paul J. Lane is the Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer Professor of the Deep
History & Archaeology of Africa at the University of Cambridge. He
has over thirty-five years’ research experience in Africa. His main inter-
ests are in the historical ecology of African landscapes, the archaeology
of colonial encounters, the materialization of memory, the organization
and use of space and time in pre-industrial societies, maritime archae-
ology, and the transition to farming in Africa. A former Director of
the British Institute in Eastern Africa (1998–2006) and President of the
Society of Africanist Archaeologists (2008–2010), he was also previously
Professor of Global Archaeology at Uppsala University (2013–2020),
where he coordinated the Marie Curie-Skłodowska Resilience in East
African Landscapes Innovative Training Network.
Mathilde Leloup received her doctorate in Political Science (Interna-
tional Relations) from Sciences Po/the Centre for International Research
(CERI) in 2019. Her Master’s thesis entitled ‘Cultural Banks: consid-
ering the redefinition of development through art’ analyzed the contri-
bution of cultural heritage to sustainable and local development. She
pursued her research on the contribution of cultural heritage to peace-
keeping in her Ph.D. thesis entitled ‘Redefining Humanity Through its
Notes on Contributors xiii
Heritage: The Incorporation of Cultural Protection into Peacekeeping

Mandates’. During her Ph.D. research, she worked under the supervi-
sion of Dr. Frederic Ramel (Sciences Po/CERI) and Dr. Dacia Viejo-
Rose (McDonald Institute/University of Cambridge). From April to
June 2017, she was a visiting researcher at the McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. From 2017 to 2019,
she was a Temporary Lecturer at Sciences Po Bordeaux. She has also
completed two double Bachelor’s degrees, one from Sciences Po and Paris
IV Sorbonne (in Political Science and French Literature) and the other
from Sciences Po and the Freie Universität of Berlin (in International
Relations).
Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of
Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Pretoria. He
completed his Ph.D. at Newcastle University, UK. Ndukuyakhe has 20
years’ experience in heritage management during which he served on
various heritage councils. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the
South African Archaeological Bulletin, Secretary for the World Archae-
ological Congress, and a member of Council for the Association for
Southern African Professional Archaeologists (ASAPA) and the South
African Archaeological Society (SAAS).
Webber Ndoro is currently the Director General of ICCROM and
an Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. Previously,
he was the Director of the African World Heritage Fund based in
Johannesburg South Africa; a programme co-ordinator at the National
Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, and a lecturer at the Univer-
sity of Zimbabwe. His recent books and edited collections include Great
Zimbabwe: Your Monument our Shrine (2000 Uppsala UP); Cultural
Heritage and the Law: Protecting Immovable Heritage in Sub-Saharan
Africa (2009, ICCROM); The Archaeological Heritage of Africa (2014
Cambridge UP) and Managing Africa’s Heritage: Who Cares? (with
Chirikure, S., and S. Deacon [eds.] 2017 Routledge). He has published
widely in leading journals on heritage management in Africa.
xiv Notes on Contributors
Christoph Rausch is an associate professor in the Humanities and

Social Sciences at University College Maastricht (UCM) and a co-
founding steering committee member of the Maastricht Centre for Arts
and Culture, Conservation and Heritage. Rausch’s book Global Heritage
Assemblages: Development and Modern Architecture in Africa appears in
the Routledge Studies in Culture and Development series. The book
is based on his dissertation, which the Boekman foundation and The
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research selected as one of the
three best theses written in The Netherlands between 2012 and 2014 in
the fields of arts, culture, and related policymaking. Rausch was visiting
researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and a guest scholar at
the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. During the
academic year 2019/2020, Rausch is a visiting researcher at the Centre
for Art Market Studies in Berlin. In the fall semester of 2021, he is
a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of
Societies in Cologne.
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen is Professor of European Prehistory and
Heritage Studies at the Department of Archaeology, University of
Cambridge, and the Director of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre
(CHRC). She has been involved with heritage research since 1990
when she designed and subsequently coordinated the M.Phil. degree in
Heritage and Museums at the University of Cambridge. Recently, this
has become a designated M.Phil. in Heritage Studies. She was the PI
for CRIC—Cultural Heritage and the Re-construction of Identities After
Conflict, 2008–2012, and is currently the PI for the project Yangshao
Culture: 100 Year Research History and Heritage Impact, 2018–2022. She
has in particular published on heritage and identity and on the condi-
tions of heritage during conflict and post-conflict. She has co-edited
various heritage-related volumes: Sørensen, M. L. S. and J. Carman (eds.)
2009. Heritage Studies: Methods and Approaches, London: Routledge;
Sørensen, M. L. S. and D. Viejo Rose (eds.) 2015. War and Cultural
Heritage. Biographies of Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press;
and Sørensen, M. L. S., D. Viejo Rose, and P. Filippucci (eds.) 2019.
Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict. From History to Heritage,
London: Palgrave.
Notes on Contributors xv
Shadia Taha obtained a B.A. (Hons) in Archaeology from the

University of Khartoum (Sudan), and her M.Phil. and Ph.D. from
the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge. Taha’s
doctoral dissertation investigates attachments to abandoned heritage,
using ethnographic research methods. Her Ph.D. was published by
Archaeopress, Oxford in 2013. In 2011, she co-edited the ‘Historic
Cities’, proceedings of the 10th Heritage Seminar with Chatzoglou,
Polyzoudi, and Sørensen. In 2004, she co-edited. Fifty Years in
the Archaeology of Africa: Themes in Archaeological Theory and Prac-
tice, in: Papers in honor of John Alexander, with Wahida, Smith,
and Rose. Her research interests include: ethnography, oral tradi-
tions, intangible cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, local commu-
nities and sustainable development. Currently, she is a consultant
for the ‘Rising from the Depths’ East Pemba Maritime Heritage
Project, Tanzania; a tutor and a member of the Board of Governing
Fellows at Wolfson College, Cambridge; an Affiliated Research
Scholar at McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Univer-
sity of Cambridge, a Researcher with the Civilisation in Contact
Project; and a Research Associate with the Indian Ocean World
Centre.
List of Figures
Needle in a Haystack? Cultural Heritage Resources in

Designated Nature Environments of Southern Africa
Fig. 1 Map showing places of cultural value within the Okavango
Delta ‘wilderness’ and ‘wildlife’ designated area (Credit:
Susan O. Keitumetse 2020) 51

Dancing in the Forests of Time
Fig. 1 Bui Dam, Ghana under construction in 2010 (Photo
credit: Wazi Apoh, August 2010) 67
Fig. 2 a ‘Forgotten heritage’? Remains of a British colonial
fort occupied between 1901 and 1904, at Loiminange,
southern end of Lake Baringo, Kenya, and now a mission
site (Photo credit: Paul Lane, April 2017); b Residual
fragments of the Bakwena National Office, Ntwseng,
Molepolole, Botswana (Photo credit: Paul Lane, March
2015); c Abandoned tanks from the 2nd (1983–2005)
Sudanese Civil War, Juba, South Sudan (Photo credit: Paul
Lane, October 2009) 69
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 3 Traces of early Dogon villages immediately below Tellem

remains (eleventh to sixteenth century AD), Banani,
Bandiagara escarpment Mali. Dogon have a refined
understanding of the chronology of the architectural
remains in their landscape that is used to tie specific
lineage histories to particular places in the landscape
(Photo credit: Paul Lane, October 1980) 72
Fig. 4 ‘Heritage’ of fields: a domesticated Marakwet
landscape of intercropping and arboriculture as seen
from the Cherangani escarpment, Tot, Kenya (Photo
credit: Paul Lane, September 2011) 77
Fig. 5 Part of Africa’s heritage? Former factory where ivory
from East Africa was cut and processed
during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Ivoryton, Connecticut, USA (Photo credit: Paul Lane,
May 2010) 87
Mega Developments in Africa: Lessons from the Meroe

Dam
Fig. 1 Meroe Dam location, Sudan (Source GNU Free
Documentation License. Dam location added by S. Taha) 130
Fig. 2 The River Nile showing the location of Meroe Dam
(Source International Rivers, People, Water, Life. Major
Dam Projects in Sudan [P:1]. Date accessed 17 January
2017) 131
Fig. 3 Lush palm groves along the riverbanks (Photo
credit: McMorrow May 2017) 138
Fig. 4 Lost cultural and social landscapes (Photo
credit: McMorrow May 2017) 139
Fig. 5 Lost familiar surroundings (Photo credit: McMorrow May
2017) 139
Fig. 6 Failed agriculture in the new resettlement areas (Source
Dirar et al. 2015. Photo credit: Mark Zeitoun April 2017) 140
Fig. 7 Re-settlement areas, showing their distance from the Nile.
Water from a drinking tank can be seen from the distance
(Source Dirar et al. 2015. Photo credit: Mark Zeitoun
April 2017) 141
List of Figures xix
Fig. 8 Proposed dams on the River Nile–Sudan (Source African

Energy 2012) 143
Heritage and Sustainability: Challenging the Archaic

Approaches to Heritage Management in the South African
Context
Fig. 1 Location of eMakhosini Valley, or the ‘Valley of the Kings’,
in KwaZulu-Natal Province (Map courtesy of Tim
Forssman, 2019) 159
The Antimonies of Heritage: Tradition and the Work of

Weaving in a Ghanaian Workshop
Fig. 1 Kente weaving competition winner being carried through
the durbar ground on the loom palanquin, Agbamevoza
festival, Kpetoe, September 2013 (Photo credit: Niamh
Clifford Collard 2013) 186
Transformation as Development: Southern Africa

Perspectives on Capacity Building and Heritage
Fig. 1 Map showing the locations of the MCRM Project
and the MARA Programme (Figure created using
ArcGIS® software by Esri. ArcGIS® and ArcMap™
are the intellectual property of Esri and are used herein
under license [Copyright © Esri. All rights reserved]) 205
Fig. 2 Photograph of graffiti at the ARAL 254 rock art site
(Photo credit: Luíseach Nic Eoin) 216
The Culture Bank in West Africa: Cultural Heritage and

Sustainable Development
Fig. 1 The diffusion of the Culture Banks model in West Africa
(Source Compiled by Mathilde Leloup. © FNSP—Sciences
Po, Atelier de cartographie, 2018) 238
Fig. 2 The Beninese Culture Bank’s three walking tours (Photo
credit: Mathilde Leloup, January 2014) 245
Fig. 3 A traditional takienta in Koutammakou (Photo credit:
Mathilde Leloup, January 2014) 246
xx List of Figures
Fig. 4 A display case in the Togolese Culture Bank featuring

a headpiece worn during the initiation ceremonies
of the Batammariba maidens (Photo credit: Mathilde
Leloup, January 2014) 246
Fig. 5 The Beninese Culture Bank in Taneka (Photo credit:
Fig. 6 The interior of the Beninese Culture Bank (Photo credit:
Exhibition Making as Aesthetic Justice: The Case of

Memorial Production in Uganda
Fig. 1 The Travelling Testimonies exhibition sites (Developed
by Shaffic Opinyi, Refugee Law Project) 274
Fig. 2 Theatre performers photographing the archival table
at Travelling Testimonies in Kasese, Uganda (Photo credit:
Kara Blackmore, 2014) 283
Fig. 3 Young Kasese resident participates in making
a collaborative artwork after viewing the exhibition (Photo
credit: Kara Blackmore, 2014) 285
Fig. 4 Public artwork ‘I AM U-Gandan’ made in collaboration
with exhibition visitors. Kasese, Uganda (Photo credit:
Kara Blackmore, 2014) 287
List of Tables
Needle in a Haystack? Cultural Heritage Resources in

Designated Nature Environments of Southern Africa
Table 1 Descriptions of some of the places of cultural significance
found within the Okavango Delta World Heritage Site
(ODWHS) depicted in Fig. 1. ODWHS is popularly
known as a natural landscape and predominantly used
for nature-tourism 55

Dancing in the Forests of Time
Table 1 Heritage challenges for Africa (Compiled by author) 64
Table 2 Suggested ways to make heritage ‘work’ for different
sectors 71
xxi
Heritage Challenges in Africa:
Contestations and Expectations
Britt Baillie and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen
Heritage and Global Trends

Heritage is always local, rooted in particular conditions and ways of
thinking and acting in the world. However, over recent decades, local
heritage practices have become increasingly internationalized as they have
become caught up in global trends, regulations, and expectations. For
instance, the instrument of World Heritage Site (WHS) nomination has
become one of the ideological and practical tools through which glob-
alization affects the ways we talk about heritage, be it tangible and/or
intangible. But other forces outside the narrow field of heritage prac-
tices also affect it. Such forces range from large infrastructure projects,
B. Baillie (B)
Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Braamfontein,
South Africa
M. L. S. Sørensen
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: mlss@cam.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2021 1

B. Baillie and M. L. S. Sørensen (eds.), African Heritage Challenges,
Globalization, Urbanization and Development in Africa,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_1
2 B. Baillie and M. L. S. Sørensen
which alter both landscapes and notions of ownership and belonging

as regards to heritage, to the influence of broader political discourses,
such as post-colonialism and environmentalism. Heritage has become
ever more entangled in these developments as various interested and
affected parties’ maneuver for control and influence. It is difficult to
take stock of these interconnections; looking across Africa, for example,
we see a highly variegated picture. Furthermore, the nature of one’s
introspection will depend on one’s particular focus—is it the effect of
the criteria of heritage valorization communicated and distributed by
UNESCO that is the concern, or is it the impact on ‘local owners’ that
is of interest, or something entirely different? The complexities do not,
however, mean that we can ignore the challenges that have arisen from
these developments.
One of the clear tendencies since the 1970s is the extent to, and
the ways in which, heritage has become recognized as a resource, be
it as a resource for community pride, an economic resource, or as a
resource used in development projects. Heritage has always been claimed.
It always ‘belonged’ to someone—individuals, communities, nations,
empires, or indeed humankind; but the enhanced recognition of heritage
as a resource matters in the modern capital-driven world, and it means
that heritage is being assigned new usage and is becoming involved with
new frameworks, such as development agendas.
At the same time, post-colonialism and other political re-orientations
have brought attention to the need and desire to rectify past wrongs.
Within heritage, this often expresses itself as a willingness to reconsider
and reallocate claims to heritage. The relationships being granted, more-
over, often take the form of redistribution of explicit legalized ownership,
rather than merely guardianship. This increased recognition of varied
forms of ownership and rights reiterates a notion of heritage as a resource
albeit a complex and multifaceted one. Equally obvious, the explicit link
between notions of ownerships and resources (or heritage as the entry
point for claiming resources such as land) means that this has become an
area of tremendous dispute, contestation, and disquiet. These tensions
are often further exaggerated due to conflictual attitudes and positions
which in their essence are not just about the protection of heritage, but
Heritage Challenges in Africa: Contestations and Expectations 3
rather about rights over its use and thus about the claimants’ positions
in the political present.
So, in many parts of the world, and in particular in former colo-
nized areas, heritage is currently pulled in different directions by various
agents, including well-intended international bodies, NGOs, commercial
actors, national institutions, a myriad of local groups and communi-
ties, and spokespersons. There are many different interests at play, and
heritage is differently valorized, even differently recognized, by these
players. At one level, the heritage concerns that have arisen from these
interactions reflect shared global challenges, but at another level they
are local and specific. We have, accordingly, become more aware of the
need for local tailor-made responses to specific challenges encountered
in different parts of the word—and at different scales of the ‘local’—and
the tensions that may arise. For example, conflicts between local practices
and values enshrined in various international conventions often come to
the fore when local traditions demand the exclusion of certain groups
from certain rites or (sacred) places (Chirikure et al. 2018: 12). These
aspects demand that we rethink what would be meaningful contempo-
rary heritage engagement and how to develop such practices. A number
of challenges can be recognized, some particular to certain parts of the
globe or specific communities, but many widely shared in terms of core
principles. In terms of current heritage challenges in Africa, we find that
two stand out as very important and widely shared: (i) heritage as part of
(sustainable) development initiatives and (ii) the roles of communities.
Before further discussing these challenges, we need to briefly reflect
on the reasons one can claim a continent (or part of a continent) as the
focus for discussing heritage challenges. Can a continent possess some
kind of essence beyond merely its geographic unity? Does this unity set
it apart from the rest of the world (Parker and Rathbone 2007)? There
is a tendency to lump all of the continent’s various regions together in
a vague abstraction—‘Africa’—which is simultaneously exceptional and
homogenous (Padayachee and Hart 2010: 2, 8). One must ask whether
‘Africa,’ or even sub-Saharan Africa, is too broad a scope to make a
coherent focus. Africa is home to the common ancestors of humankind
and is characterized by extraordinary levels of cultural, religious, ethnic
as well as natural diversity. Given the plurality of landscapes, communi-

ties, and ways of living, defining shared responses to heritage challenges is
not only unrealistic, but probably also counterproductive. It is, however,
possible to engage in debates, identify shared challenges, good prac-
tices, and failures, and to use specific case studies to gain more detailed
insights into varied forms of heritage and heritage defining processes.
This volume does not advocate copy-paste, parachuted, or one-size-fits-
all solutions. Yet, the suggestions that are explored are of interest to us
all, even if they are deemed unsuitable for certain contexts or require
considerable adaptation to local conditions.
Calls for decolonization, referring not just to institutions and resources
but also to the mind (e.g., Thiong’o 1986; Mudimbe 1988; Mbembe
2001), and the development of a post-colonial critical reinterpretation
of ‘Africa’ are part of an ongoing African intellectual debate that deeply
affects heritage (Konaré 1983; Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016; Chirikure
2016; Chirikure et al. 2016). The current explicit focus on decoloniza-
tion is important, not just in its own right but also in terms of its
potential opposition to the simultaneous globalizing trends. Moreover,
this development is not just about political rectification but can also
be argued to reveal deeper philosophical distinctions, focusing on new
or different ways of understanding and thinking, including about core
concepts such as heritage value (e.g., Mbembe 2001: 14). However, these
are not simple challenges or easy tasks to carry out in practice.
In putting this volume together, we have, therefore, been concerned
about how a continent-wide focus risks echoing a colonial gaze. Much
of the scholarship about African heritage (with this book no excep-
tion) is carried out by or under the auspices of non-Africans, is tied to
development funded by international bodies, and is informed by inter-
national heritage discourses (cf. Akiwumi 2014; Boswell 2011; Rausch,
this volume). Attitudes to heritage in Africa are often shaped as a ‘mission
of rescue’ with externally formulated solutions. The need for diverse
African voices to be heard on this topic is obvious. Therefore, when orga-
nizing the African Heritage Challenges conference, from which this book
emanates, we made a widely disseminated open call for papers coupled
with travel funding to engage a broad range of scholars from Africa,
some of who were subsequently able to contribute to this volume. But
the volume also includes contributions from non-Africans working in

different parts of the continent. So in answer to the question of with
what kind of legitimacy do we discuss Africa’s heritage, especially if we
do not all have practical involvement or responsibility for what happens,
nor could happen there, we propose that: African heritage practices
and experiences have significance at local, regional, and international
levels and that different voices and positions may all make worth-
while contributions towards pushing critical future-orientated heritage
agendas.
We assert that despite Africa’s diversity, there may be common ground
in terms of how some of the global heritage challenges are encountered
on the continent. Echoing the concerns of Daly and Winter, who faced
similar challenges editing the Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia
(2012), we are mindful of the inevitable gaps and omissions that arise
when addressing such a large geographical area. We make no claims of
analytical, thematic, or geographic comprehensiveness; but we suggest
that scrutinizing ongoing practices and learning from examples is a
worthwhile endeavor. The task that lies ahead for future scholars—is how
to continue to do so in a manner that does not undercut the African
shaping of its heritage and its management.
Heritage Challenges in Africa

The tourism industry uses images such as the Pyramids, Robben Island,
the Big Five, or ‘cultural villages’ to brand ‘Africa.’ The reductive focus
means that the subtlety and diversity of local cultures are lost, risking
African hosts becoming prisoners of clichés (Ashworth 2014: 14; Passano
2012: 1342). Such branding contrasts sharply with the 13 May 2000
cover of The Economist which labeled Africa ‘The Hopeless Continent.’
In the post-independence period, many well-intentioned governments,
donors, and NGOs persist in seeing Africa, ‘through the telescope of
one hundred years of crises from tum-of-the century rinderpest to turn-
of-the-century AIDS’ (Roe 1999: 7). Despite a post-millennium focus
on the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative, the continent continues to be portrayed
in the international media as being plagued by primeval irrationality,
tribal anarchy, civil war, political instability, flagrant corruption, incom-

petent leadership, managerial ineptitude, hunger, famine, starvation, and
rampant diseases (Michira 2002). Collier (2007) argues that these char-
acteristics coupled with the continent’s rich (mineral) resources have led
to a ‘resource curse’ enhancing the internal fragmentation of African
countries. Yet, correlation is not the same as causation.
One must query what is going on when experts persistently frame
Africa within crisis narratives. Roe (1999: 6) asserts that this promotes
paternalism and becomes the primary means whereby development
experts, and the institutions for which they work, claim rights to stew-
ardship over resources they do not own. Ferguson (1994) goes further to
argue that this understanding of ‘development’ problematically defines
poverty as a technical problem with a technical solution, thereby de-
politicizing it. A twofold claim is put forth, namely, not only are insiders,
specifically local residents, not able to steward their resources, but those
who really know how to sustain those resources are outsiders, specif-
ically professionally trained resource managers or agents of the state.
In response, heritage managers and archaeologists are often perceived
by local communities as grave robbers, treasure seekers; or as being ‘in
the pocket’ of developers and/or government (Arazi 2009: 96; Chirikure
2014: 220; Ndlovu 2017: 156; Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016; Taha, this
volume). Yet, in other circumstances, heritage practitioners are regarded
as allies or advocates against large multinationals, developers, and the
state, or as advisors for (tourism) development (Abunga 2016; Apoh and
Gavua 2016; Nasir and Ndoro 2018).
All domains of heritage are currently informed by ‘notions of endan-
germent’ (Harrison 2015: 35). Certainly, a crisis narrative has been and
continues to be adopted by many heritage practitioners who regard
Africa’s heritage as being under threat from armed conflict, terrorism,
climate change, illicit trafficking, neglect, natural disasters, population
growth, and the cultural erosion which accompanies ‘modernisation and
development’ (Arazi 2009: 95; Ichumbaki and Mjema 2018; Moon
2005; Schmidt and McIntosh 1996; UNESCO 2017a). The damage
caused by the extractive industries, mega-projects, tourism develop-
ment, and urbanization can be singled out. The ‘undeveloped’ nature
of heritage management in the region is seen to have exasperated
these issues (Breen 2007: 357; Stahl 2005; Nasir and Ndoro 2018;
Ndobochani and Pwiti 2018; Robertshaw 1990). Despite a series of
initiatives over the last three decades, national surveys, institutions, legis-
lation, and capacity are regarded as inadequate in many African states
(Arazi 2009: 96; Kankpeyeng and DeCorse 2004; McIntosh 1993). In
2006, UNESCO created the African World Heritage Fund in response
to the unique pressures on sites on the continent. A decade later, in 2016,
UNESCO launched the annual African World Heritage Day in an effort
to raise the profile of African World Heritage Sites. Despite these initia-
tives, the proportion of African World Heritage Sites has not changed
significantly, nor has the number of sites listed as being ‘in danger’ been
radically reduced (Ndoro 2017: 130). Problems remain, and these are
not just practical ones or due to lack of resources, or the underrepresenta-
tion of sub-Saharan Africans on relevant committees or advisory boards,
but are also about, and due to, disparities between the understanding of
heritage within different sectors of societies and a lack of trust. These
issues are clearly demonstrated by several of the case studies within the
volume.
It is important to be critical of the tendency of mechanical crisis narra-
tives; nonetheless, many parts of Africa face substantial and complex
challenges. Three aspects seem crucial for understanding the ways in
which the role and potentials for heritage may be particular to Africa.
These are the socioeconomic and political pressures on heritage, the
legacy of colonialism, and the roles of traditional connections with
heritage. From these emerge a need to better understand and plan for
the role of heritage in (sustainable) development and to find ways to
ensure that it may remain a meaningful presence in the everyday lives of
various communities.
The Socioeconomic and Political Pressures
Temporally, Africa’s heritage spans from the origins of humankind to a

staggering heterogeneity of contemporary iterations of traditional prac-
tices and rites. Yet, Africa remains underrepresented on the World
Heritage List. At the beginning of 2018, only 135 sites were listed on the
continent (90 sites in sub-Saharan Africa and 41 sites in North Africa)

making up a mere 13% of the World Heritage list. It is also rather telling
of attitudes that 43 of these sites were designated as natural ones (with
another 6 being mixed). In comparison, of the 390 WHS in Europe, a
mere 6% are natural sites. Even more striking, 17 of the African WHS
(13% of all African WHS) are listed as in danger; in Europe, the ratio
is 1.5%; and globally, it is around 5%.1 This data suggests that Africa’s
contribution to world culture tends to be underestimated and that the
management of sites is often regarded as inadequate when compared with
international expectations and policies.
However, these figures may reveal more about expectations about what
heritage in Africa should look like and the effect of using outdated
assumptions about the value of particular forms of visibility, than it
tells about what Africa’s heritage is and in particular how its different
communities understand and value their heritage. The perceived lack of
important heritage, irrespective of whether it is based on an ‘external’
perception and outdated measures, does, however, point to a need to
articulate Africa-based understandings, whether driven by local commu-
nities or the state, of what they (in the most plural forms) want their
heritage to be (see Ndoro, this volume). It is not, and cannot be, the role
of international bodies to decide these matters.
Developmental and political pressures in parts of Africa mean that
such concerns about its heritage have become urgent challenges. In turn,
the continent, with its many constituent parts, needs to contemplate
the instrumentalization of heritage as not just an economic resource,
but also a crucial political one. This concern comes into sharp relief
when connected to sociopolitical and economic realities. Africa has just
been through two decades of unprecedented economic growth during
which the economy grew 4.7% per year (from 2000 to 2017) making
it the world’s second-fastest growing region (AU/OECD 2018). Yet, this
growth has often been ‘decoupled’ from formal job creation and has not
translated into ‘higher well-being’ (ibid). Despite the Millennium Devel-
opment Goals’ target to reduce poverty in Africa to 28% by 2015, it
remained at 48% (Nhamo 2017: 232). According to the World Bank,
Africa as of 2013 had the globe’s lowest human development indicators,
with one in 16 children dying before their fifth birthday (Diop 2013:
vii). While population growth slowed in much of the world, in Africa

the population has increased from 477 million in 1980 to 1.2 billion in
2017 and is expected to double to 2.4 billion by 2050 (United Nations
Populations Division 2017). As a result, the number of people living
in extreme poverty in Africa increased by more than 100 million over
the last two decades, and it is projected that the world’s extreme poor
will increasingly be concentrated in Africa (Beegle et al. 2016: v). After
a decade of ‘relative peace,’ conflict is on the rise and the continent’s
inequality gap continues to widen (ibid: 1). So, what is, or could be, the
role of heritage within this variegated context? To engage with this ques-
tion, we do need to bring into the equation some of the restrictions that
historically have been imposed upon Africa’s heritage and the means and
reasons for engaging with it.
Legacies of Colonialism
Beyond the continent, the perception of ‘Africa’ has been heavily influ-
enced by the ways in which Europe has imagined it, including its
history and heritage. The Greek and Roman portrayals of Africa by
Herodotus, Diodorus of Sicily, and Pliny populated the continent with
strange beings. The slave trade meant that Europeans needed to develop
a better knowledge of Africa and Africans—both of those whom they
enslaved and those whom they traded with. Colonialism was inextri-
cably intertwined with the notion of exploring Africa and establishing
what Said (1978) calls the ‘positional superiority’ of the colonizers. The
more Europeans dominated Africans, the more savage their portrayals of
Africans became (Brantlinger 1985: 184). African culture and heritage
were used to order the continent, to enforce boundaries between the
‘civilised’ and the ‘savages,’ and to fetishize the latter (Tilly 2007). In
the nineteenth century, (evolutionary) anthropology strengthened the
stereotypes offered by missionaries and the imperial apparatus. As the
colonizers held a monopoly on discourse, Africans were stripped of
articulation. African customs and beliefs were condemned as supersti-
tious, their social organizations were despised and demolished, their land,
belongings, and labor appropriated (Brantlinger 1985: 198). It was only
in the postwar period that Raymond Michelet in his African Empires and
Civilizations (1945) and Basil Davidson and Georges Balandier in their
numerous publications opposed widely accepted conceptions of Africans
as ‘living fossils’ or members of ‘frozen societies.’ Indeed, revisionist
views of African history and culture made prominent contributions to
African nationalism and independence (J. C. de Graft Johnson’s African
Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations (1954) and Cheikh Anta
Diop’s, Nations nègres et culture (1954). Yet, despite these revolutionary
publications, scholarship on Africa continued to produce works which
portrayed African communities as bounded and timeless—as people
without history (Aria et al. 2014).
Colonization exercised an interest in heritage, frequently using it for
political and ideological aims. Napoleon Bonaparte’s military expedi-
tion to Egypt (1798–1801) with its extensive ‘scientific expedition’ is
a well-known early example of this intertwining of scientific, political,
and economic interests, including territorial gain and control. Heritage
was also mobilized to justify racial segregation and the colonizers’ claims
of cultural superiority (Garlake 1972; Meskell 2011; Ndoro and Pwiti
2001). It was taken for granted that Africans could produce ‘nothing
of value’: the technique of ‘Yoruba statuary must have come from
Egyptians, Benin art must be a Portuguese creation, the architectural
achievement of Zimbabwe was due to Arab technicians, and Hausa and
Buganda statecraft were inventions of white invaders’ (Mudimbe 1988:
13).
Different regimes sought to outdo each other in the ‘scramble for
Africa,’ and the investigation, salvage, and control of the past was one
field within which such endeavors of control could be exercised (Carman
2012: 19). This self-appointed task was driven in part by the belief
that ‘native cultures’ would vanish through contact with whites and the
‘modernisation’ or ‘development’ that they believed themselves to have
introduced (Gruber 1970; Lane, this volume; Lindqvist 1996). This
resulted in not just scientific expeditions and research, but also often in
the founding of heritage legislation and institutions based on the Euro-
pean model. This introduced a form of heritage management carried
out at the behest of the colonial elite. Local communities were neither
included in the process (apart from as manual laborers) nor regarded
as the audience for these endeavors (Ndoro et al. 2018). Development

carried out toward the tail end of colonialism was undertaken in part
to address, curtail, and ultimately control the concerns raised by rising
liberation movements. Through these initiatives, local elites were inte-
grated into structures established by the colonizers (including heritage
institutions) ‘so that at independence the institutional inheritance was
not one created organically out of the development of the institutions
of “traditional rule” but one superimposed by colonial rule’ (Lawrence
2010: 28).
The full effects of colonialism in Africa are not understood nor were
they even across the different colonial regimes. They include not just the
outcomes arising from the insertion of alien infrastructure and manage-
rial philosophies, from the displacement of people and alterations of
demographics, and from enforced changes to economic practices but also
effects in terms of cultural behavior and expectations, sense of belonging
as well as deeper-rooted notions of self, rights, and efficacies. Some
argue that the colonized in part internalized the imposed racial stereo-
types, particularly in attitudes toward technology, culture, and language
(Mudimbe 1988: 106). Thus, the protocols and expectations inherited
from the colonial period and the (partial) internalization of the hege-
monic model, continue to define much of the heritage scholarship and
‘official’ or ‘authorised’ practice on the continent (cf. Chirikure et al.
2018; Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016; Passano 2012: 1341).
It should be noted, however, that the various colonial powers and
administrative systems did not entirely erase preexisting understandings
and relations to heritage, even if they were made largely invisible in the
legal system. Colonialism’s legacy is, therefore, neither entirely perva-
sive nor homogenous across the continent. Alternative ways of valuing
and being with heritage, which are unrelated to the ontologies of the
dominant paradigm, are held and practiced in various forms. Thus, the
contemporary African concept of heritage management has two roots,
or forms. One is the inherited colonial notion of heritage management
as part of an administrative and legalistic top-down system. The other
is an older parallel existence of traditional custodianships and practices
that have kept part of the cultural heritage alive despite its lack of formal
recognition (Bwasiri 2011; Ichumbaki 2016; Jopela 2018). In practice,
these distinct, although sometimes overlapping, approaches continue to

relate to educational and socioeconomic differences within Africa today.
Relating to Heritage
In Africa, the concern with the community relevance of heritage finds

expression through various community-orientated initiatives. This has
both commonalities with and yet diverges from general global trends. It
is similar to what happens in other areas insofar as the heritage discourse
articulated by international heritage conventions and charters as well as
regional actors over recent decades has become ever more focused on
the recognition of alternative understandings of heritage, the rights of
‘cultural owners,’ and meaningful involvement of local communities.
This has, for example, led to calls for greater contextualization of heritage
management practices in terms of their respective cultural contexts (e.g.,
the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity, 1999 Burra Charter, 1999
Hoi An Protocol, 2000 China Principles, 2002 Budapest Declaration
on World Heritage, the 2003 Intangible Heritage Convention). These
shifts have predominantly emanated from Asia and Oceania, but they
have potentially profound implications for the African continent—both
in terms of sharing insights and ideas of new management practices
and philosophies, and for understanding our differences and how they
emanate from the specific relations that exist between communities and
their heritage.
The notion of custodians of tradition, which is found in many parts of
Africa, is a particularly salient aspect of the heritage challenge in Africa.
This understanding of heritage, and especially its ‘management,’ appears
strongly linked to living heritage, and it is often based in contemporary
practices and promulgated through oral tradition. Within these practices,
special people—elders, traditional or ritual leaders—take central roles in
the management of heritage, in the valorization of certain places and
associated cultural practices, and in turn, the authority of different roles
becomes intermingled with the significance and value of heritage at the
local level. The understanding of heritage expressed within such custo-
dial practices does appear to express a different kind of relationship to
heritage than we see, for example, in Europe—from which the dominant

heritage paradigm emanated. This may be encapsulated in the differ-
ence between the terms guardian and custodian, in other words, rights
versus caretaking perspective. Guardianship refers to a legal relation-
ship in which one party is empowered to act for the benefit of another,
whereas custodians have a wider set of duties regarding the well-being
of the subject. One of the outcomes of this difference is that heritage
management in Europe is hierarchically organized and largely formal-
ized, whereas in many parts of Africa such state-based systems and locally
derived practices and governance exist in parallel.
The shifts toward differently rooted engagements with heritage have
not been straightforward and thus remain incomplete (see Byrne 2014;
Poulios 2014). Due to the legacies of colonialism and the Western-
centric concerns of what Smith 2006 has labeled the ‘Authorised Heritage
Discourse’ (AHD), official heritage management in Africa continues to
be predominantly concerned with normative understandings of natural
and monumental heritage. While increased recognition has been given
to the rights of communities as well as potentials of traditional manage-
ment approaches, understandings of both what heritage is and how it can
appropriately be cared for, by whom, and for whose benefit in a rapidly
changing Africa, remain highly contested.
Perhaps the future will not entail the ‘development’ of heritage
management practice in Africa, but rather its disentanglement from the
AHD? The role of heritage in (sustainable) development and the connec-
tions between heritage and communities could be two core aspects of this
future. The parallel presence of two different philosophies of manage-
ment, and of value, is one of the distinct traits of Africa today, and it
is central to some of the fractures that are currently experienced and
debated (see Ndlovu, this volume; Ndoro and Pwiti 2001). The future
fate of these two traditions—can they coexist or will both have to trans-
form to suit new concerns—is an important ongoing debate for African
heritage practitioners and theorists. The contributions to this volume
indicate the rich potential of the work that is currently being undertaken
around this theme.
Heritage and (Sustainable) Development

Independence and the pursuit of ‘modernity’ through large-scale devel-
opment projects ushered in the current globalizing heritage discourse in
Africa. A key example was the International Nubian Campaign (1960–
1971), which was mounted to salvage archaeological sites threatened by
the construction of Egypt’s Aswan High Dam (see Ndoro and Wijesuriya
2015). Among others, this project resulted in the valorization of what
became known as ‘World Heritage’ which claims to preserve heritage
on behalf of ‘humankind’ (Hassan 2007). Half a century later, it seems
timely to reflect on how the relationship between heritage management
and development has shifted on the continent. A perusal of the relevant
literature suggests that much of the rhetoric used by the contempo-
rary heritage sector and its funders continues to be phrased in terms of
this salvage paradigm (cf. Apoh and Gavua 2016; Arthur, Mohapi, and
Mitchell 2011; Ichumbaki and Mjema 2018; Falser 2015: 14; King and
Arthur 2014; Nic Eoin and King 2013).
In Africa, the development and heritage agendas have often been
regarded as ‘clashing.’ Although they often have the greatest impact
on communities, heritage, and the environment, mega-development
projects often continue to regard heritage as little more than an expensive
afterthought, an unessential ‘luxury’ (Nasir and Ndoro 2018; Taha, this
volume). Advocates highlight that development provides the opportunity
to address some of the socioeconomic challenges that the continent faces,
and provides opportunities for site discovery, conservation, training,
and the funding of heritage-related research (Chirikure 2014). Yet, the
highest, if invisible, cost incurred by heritage development, is the oppor-
tunity costs of other development options forgone (Ashworth 2014: 13).
Heritage scholars and practitioners recognize the pressing need for devel-
opment in Africa, but they also query at what cost Africa’s heritage sites
and practices are being ‘developed.’ They caution against ‘development’
in the form of ‘a weak mixture of lost tradition and unaffordable moder-
nity’ (Latouche 2004). Heritage managers often portray developers and
the archaeologists who work for them as ‘the bad ones’ whose ‘love for
profit outweighs their love of the heritage’ (Ndlovu 2017: 154). Yet,
this in part reveals an underlying ‘reluctance among heritage “profes-

sionals” to think in economic terms or place their activities within an
economic context, for which they are usually unfamiliar, untrained and
often unsympathetic’ (Ashworth 2014: 13).
Objective 4 of the UNESCO 2012–2017 Action Plan for the African
Region highlights the necessity to ‘develop and implement strategies to
enable State Parties to effectively address the challenges of balancing
heritage conservation and development needs (authors’ emphasis).’ In
part, this is a reflection on how shifting development paradigms and
agendas employed on the continent to date have revealed themselves to
be unsustainable (Nhamo 2017: 228). Yet, Bushell and Staiff (2012: 247)
stress the need to be ambivalent about the notion of conservation and
development being ‘balanced.’ The contributions to this volume look
instead to unsettle this oft-used binary and attempt to move beyond the
expectations this precarious language creates, instead seeing conservation
and development as entangled processes with multiple definitions within
living places with (plural) heritages.
Since independence, the elusive goal of ‘development’ has been central
to the agenda of African nations, which became regarded as ‘laborato-
ries’ for different development paradigms. The idea of Culture Banks
discussed by Leloup in this volume is an example of such experimenta-
tion. Yet, the (immediate) post-independence reliance on former colonial
masters, the structural adjustment policies of the 1980–1990s, and the
more recent sustainable development agendas have been the subject
of significant critiques. Indeed, the Council for the Development of
Social Science Research in Africa (2005) noted ‘the continuing failure of
thinkers and practitioners to historicize African development, the inap-
propriateness of the dominant paradigms to the African cultural milieu,
the persistent resort to unilineal models, and the glorification of tech-
nicist notions of development bereft of power relations’ as challenges to
which responses need to be forged.
Despite decades of (uneven) emphasis and practice, there remains an
enormous disjuncture between official aspirations and actual develop-
ment. Kothari (2011: 65) argues that in its failure to acknowledge its
own colonial heritage, the development industry has tended to repro-
duce, or at best merely rework, ‘relationships, perceptions and attitudes
of empire.’ Others, however, argue that former colonies in other parts of

the world are faring better, prompting them to suggest that the root of
the problems in Africa is to be found in corruption, poor governance,
ongoing armed conflicts, and/or it’s ‘incapacity to follow the Western
model’ (Freund 2010: 43). Yet, Célestin Monga (2014), at the time a
Senior Economic Advisor-Director at the World Bank stated: ‘The main
reason for our failure has been bad ideas. Period. Not bad leaders, poor
institutions, bad infrastructure. But simply bad ideas.’
At the time of independence, understandings of ‘development’ were
rooted in belief that economic transformation and growth would
inevitably lead to the attainment of ‘modernity.’ Initially, the emergent
‘development sector’ equated ‘traditional’ society with underdevelopment
or saw it as an inferior phase to full development (Castro-Gómez 2007:
436). In this framework, ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ were regarded as obstacles
to ‘modernisation’ and ‘progress.’ The final declaration of the Intergov-
ernmental Conference on Cultural Policies in Africa (AFRICACULT)
in 1975, marked an opportunity for change as it affirmed the will of
African states ‘to give culture the decisive position which it should right-
fully occupy in the process of global development, of which man is both
the agent and the end.’2
However, by the 1990s, across the continent there was a widespread
perception of the failure of ‘development’ and the belief that ‘cultural
dimensions have somehow been left out of the equation’ (Klitgaard
1994: 82). In practice, ‘terms such as undeveloped, traditional and back-
ward replaced the colonial nomenclature of the primitive, savage and
aboriginal’ as ‘the tendency to equate spatial or cultural distance with
temporal distance’ remained common to both colonial and development
discourses (Basu and Modest 2014: 5). The programs introduced often
encouraged materialist aspirations and desires to consume the goods
and services produced (including technocratic knowledge) by the so-
called Advanced Economies3 further undermining traditional practices
and values (Labadi and Gould 2015: 198).
These criticisms brought on the ‘cultural turn’ epitomized by the UN
Decade for Cultural Development 1988–1997 (UNESCO 2014a: 11).
References to the importance of culture both as a driver and enabler for
sustainable development have been included in recent major documents
that chart the path for a renewed development agenda, including the
2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the
Diversity of Cultural Expressions. In response to this shift, the heritage
agenda in Africa has moved from an Authorised Heritage Discourse
approach which sought to freeze sites at all costs to a perspective which
regards heritage as instrumental in leveraging development (Abunga
2016: 11).
This, however, is not necessarily easy. While people go hungry, lack
shelter, and clean drinking water and have no access to basic health care
or primary education, donors query how they can justify devoting scarce
resources to heritage (Basu and Modest 2014: 11). Schmidt and Pikirayi
(2016: 19) caution that archaeologists and heritage managers in Africa
‘cannot look the other way when confronted by poverty, disease, inade-
quate shelter and poor education.’ Conversely, Mire (2011: 73) questions
whether care for heritage should ‘remain only something for the privi-
leged countries where matters of peace, security, food, and health have
largely been overcome?’
For some community members, heritage items both cultural (arti-
facts and properties for example) and natural (ivory, pangolin scales,
etc.) have become resources sold to support subsistence. For a minority,
heritage is a means to get rich quick. But when communities are
involved in heritage projects, they often express their disappointment or
lament the ‘unfulfilled promises’ of such programs. The failure of such
initiatives to address socioeconomic redistribution has made it difficult
to change the perception of heritage as ancillary to the development
equation (Chirikure et al. 2010; Ndoro 2001: 23). The underfunded
sector has rendered many conservation projects heavily donor depen-
dant. The quest for private or international partnerships has forced some
projects into Faustian bargains. In many cases, the result is that local
communities, who often have different development aspirations from
those imposed by managing authorities, do not regard themselves as
the primary beneficiaries of heritage projects. This in turn renders the
future of such endeavors problematic, if not untenable and at times
involves a transformation of the heritage in question to meet outsider
aims (Keitumetse, this volume). Furthermore, donors often seek to
work with NGOs as opposed to the state on the grounds of mistrust,
corruption, etc. However, such strategies risk ultimately further weak-

ening the state and/or creating parallel systems and institutions (Leloup;
Lane, this volume).
Tourism is the primary means through which heritage has been instru-
mentalized as a resource. Advocates portray tourism as a panacea empha-
sizing its economic and sociocultural benefits (promoting mutual under-
standing, improving well-being, enhancing education, preserving local
cultural and environmental heritage, fostering local pride, catalyzing
infrastructure development, etc.) (Ashworth 2014; Marschall 2012).
Others urge caution, highlighting the costs and potential negative
impacts of tourism, including leakage, the promotion of unproductive
land uses, a widening development gap, dependency and sociocultural
costs (cultural homogenization, commoditization, prostitution, crime,
considerable environmental impact, and carbon footprint) (Corbin Sies
2014; Loubes 2015). Heritage development projects in Africa have often
produced mono-functional heritage dependent places which fall victim
to fluctuations in the market much more rapidly than their more diver-
sified counterparts. Many communities court tourism, but perhaps need
help from heritage experts to apprise the pitfalls that such projects may
entail (Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016: 17).
Heritage tourism is often identified on the continent as a means to
capitalize on heritage with the aim of enabling access to the way of
life experienced in the ‘Advanced Economies’ (Fazi and Furt 2009). Yet,
hosts may feel incarcerated in the ‘repetition of the ancestral’ invoked
by Nora (1996), while they wish to narrow the distance between their
world and that of their visitors, seeking a share in their ‘modernity.’
Developing ways of engaging with tourism in a manner that is genuinely
supportive of heritage, community lifeways and aspirations therefore
remains a major challenge in Africa and globally.
Since the 1990s, a significant portion of development aid has been
channeled into heritage-related projects rooted in tourism. A study by
Naidoo et al. (2019) indicates that children residing within 10 km of 603
multiple-use protected natural heritage areas in 34 ‘developing counties’
had 17% higher wealth levels and 16% lower poverty levels than those
residing further away. Yet, tourism is accused of prioritizing economic
sustainably over ecological and cultural concerns while community-based

tourism initiatives have a poor record of survival (Marschall 2012: 726).
Some scholars argue that certain African nations have become aid
dependant while failing to reduce poverty levels (Chao et al., 2010:
454; Collier 2007; Moyo 2009). Former colonial powers dominated
aid provision in the immediate aftermath of independence. During the
Cold War, developmental assistance became a proxy battlefield. Over
the last two decades, partly in an effort to shift away from (aid) depen-
dency, development projects were launched across the continent on ‘a
scale reminiscent of the era of independence’ (Arazi 2009: 103). Impor-
tant heritage sites are often discovered or affected by such projects and
by the continents continued reliance on the extraction of non-renewable
resources and other raw materials (Bocoum 2008; Folorunso 2008; King
et al., this volume). Even when impact assessments are carried out, there
is a general bias toward the biophysical elements of the environment,
often coupled with a lack of comprehensive data to guide fieldwork and
analysis, a shortage of qualified people, and time pressure, with the result
that implementation of relevant legislation can be challenging (Campbell
2000; King et al., this volume; Ndobochani and Pwiti 2018). The further
impact of such projects on intangible heritage has only recently become
a concern (see, e.g., Taha, this volume).
In Africa’s ‘developer friendly environment’, investors or donors often
fail to adhere to the relevant codes of practice or legislation (Apoh
and Gavua 2016: 220). According to José Graziano da Silva, the
Director General of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Agency, Africa
is perceived as a ‘wild west’ for contemporary investors (Tran 2012).
Among other factors, the 2007–2008 financial crisis encouraged large-
scale land grabs and the launch of ‘developmental’ projects in Africa
by China and Middle Eastern nations. This may signal a return to the
‘overtly economistic approaches to development typical of the post war
era, prior to the “cultural turn”’ (Basu and Modest 2014: 25).
The formalization of the concept of sustainable development has been
one way to address such concerns. Stemming from fears of the envi-
ronmental consequences of unbridled economic growth, the seminal
1987 Brundtland report defined sustainable development ‘as a process
of change through which the exploitation of resources, direction of
investments, technical and institutional mutations are in harmony and

reinforce the potential and future meeting of human needs… It must
meet the present needs without compromising the ability of future gener-
ations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987: 43). The launch of
the report meant that the dominant development model which hitherto
had focused primarily on producing financial returns was called upon
to account for social and environmental, and since the 2002 Johannes-
burg Summit, cultural impacts as well. However, culture as a so-called
fourth pillar has yet to gain the traction of the other three and therefore
remains understudied and represented (Keitsch et al. 2016: 273; Parra
et al. 2018: 1). Three decades since the launch of the Brundtland report
considerable gains have been made toward sustainable development on
the global scale, but in Africa such development remains elusive and the
concept continues to be contested (Nhamo 2017: 232).
International awareness of the concept of sustainability was cemented
by the launch of Agenda 21, a product of the 1992 Earth Summit.
Quickly embraced by environmental conservationist, the notion of
‘sustainability’ was found to have profound crossovers with that of
cultural heritage in that both focus on providing a meaningful legacy
for future generations (Keitumetse 2011; Robinson and Picard 2006).
UNESCO’s World Decade for Cultural Development (1988–1997) and
the launch of Our Creative Diversity sought in the words of its Presi-
dent, former UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, ‘to do for
“culture and development” what had been achieved for “environment
and development”’ (quoted in Torggler et al. 2015: 6). Yet, despite a
surge in references to sustainable development in UNESCO declarations
and conventions,4 national policy documents, and in academic literature,
and although even the smallest development projects in Africa today pay
at least lip service to this criterion, a lack of shift in practice indicates
the limitations of cultural economics as an influencer of actual behavior
(Labadi and Gould 2015: 205; Torggler et al. 2015; Robinson and Picard
2006).
Initially, within environmental conservation circles, sustainability
was viewed as steady-state equilibrium concerned with preserving a
finite resource through management strategies that avoided depletion.
However, living systems do not exist in steady states, they survive
by changing and adapting and seeking a dynamic equilibrium within

evolving environments (Landman 2018). Therefore, sustainability is not
about restoring something to its original state or preventing failure,
neither is it a goal or a solution to problems in and of itself. In Africa,
environmental sustainability is often understood to mean conservation
of the land and its ecosystems (see Keitumetse, this volume). In prac-
tice, this has often elevated the needs of ‘nature’ over the needs of people
(Ribot in Corbin Sies 2014: x). Within the development sector, however,
sustainability has been used to promote initiatives that would result
in ongoing and long-term economic growth and/or economically self-
sustaining public institutions. Yet, not all of the population bears the
cost of development equally and the pursuit of economic sustainability
can amplify certain people’s marginality (Ribot in Corbin Sies 2014: xi).
Problematically, development practices can be sustainable and just, as
well as sustainable and unjust (Marcuse 1998: 105).
UNESCO (2014b) has made Africa a ‘priority’ for 2014–2021 with
the aim to ‘harness the power of culture for sustainable development and
peace.’ Yet, when cultural sustainability is pursued, it is often rooted in
archaic understandings of tangible heritage which value historicity over
contemporary practice or dated anthropological understandings which
prioritize ‘pristine’ cultures over changing cultural behaviors (Keitumetse
2011: 54). In 2003, the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible
Cultural Heritage elevated an alternative understanding by stressing that
intangible cultural heritage is ‘a guarantee of sustainable development.’
Paradoxically, the Convention’s own Operational Directives continue to
warn of the danger of development which it regards as being ‘a real threat
to the viability of the intangible cultural heritage’ (Labadi 2011: 117).
The omission of culture and heritage from the Millennium Develop-
ment Goals indicates the difficulty experienced to date in achieving their
full integration into discourses of sustainability (Labadi and Gould 2015:
200).
Many heritage and/or development projects have sought to address
the economic, environmental, social, and cultural dimensions of sustain-
ability. Case studies from Botswana (Keitumetse, this volume) Mali
(Corbin Sies 2014), Mozambique and Namibia (Silva and Khatiwada
2014), and South Africa (Ndlovu, this volume) indicate the tensions
which arise between different sustainability discourses and their accom-

panying development practices. In part, this is due to the difficulties
of measuring cultural sustainability. UNESCO’s Culture for Develop-
ment Indicators (CDIS) project has attempted to empirically illustrate
cultures multidimensional contribution to development and advocate
for its greater integration in the national development agendas. Part
of this initiative is focused on four African countries: Ghana, Swazi-
land, Namibia, and Burkina Faso (UNESCO 2014a: 5). However, CDIS
takes the view that heritage sustainability largely depends on policies
and advocacy actions that ensure the protection of cultural heritage’s
‘fragile wealth’ (UNESCO 2014a: 130). This approach assumes that top-
down policy making through the deployment of the Authorised Heritage
Discourse is the most valuable means to secure sustainability. Perhaps a
more dynamic definition of heritage rooted in African traditions while
recognizing it as ‘whatever the present selects from imagined pasts to
satisfy contemporary needs’ could help to further remove any contradic-
tions between heritage and (sustainable) development (Ashworth 2014:
8).
The museumification and ‘fortress’ approaches to conservation of
heritage, widely applied in Africa, have been criticized for effectively
‘holding it back’ in a romanticized version of its past rather than
providing a vision for its sustainable future (Meskell 2011, Ndlovu, this
volume). At the same time, drawing on idealized notions of pre-colonial
traditions, calls have been made for ‘voluntary simplicity’ or ‘de-growth’
economics in Africa (Latouche 2004). Such ideas break the assumption
that we must have more to be better off, and suggest that managing with
less in some instances and/or redistributing existing resources in a more
effective way might help ensure that humans consume no more than
their ‘equitable share of nature’ (Alexander 2015: 133). These calls place
a double bind on communities in Africa implying that their future devel-
opment rests on their ability to remain in what some perceive to be an
undeveloped past and present. Scholars and practitioners will have to be
mindful about the impacts of ‘imposing a vision of sustainability that
derives from Western privilege on countries operating with varied and
different political economies and open our eyes to the everyday kinds
of sustainability practices that ordinary citizens deploy to respond to the
environments and economies they find themselves in’ (Corbin Sies 2014:
xvi).
Heritage and development professionals have ‘determined the futures
imagined for development beneficiaries, including how their pasts should
be preserved, or sacrificed, or made into a resource in attaining those
futures’ (Basu and Modest 2014: 10). Moving forward, African nations
will have to address the question of how to domesticate both the concepts
of ‘sustainable development’ and heritage to make them appropriate
for the needs of the continent and its constituent parts. Sustainability
discourses require further interrogation, asking whose interests they
serve, and carefully observing how environmental, economic, social, and
cultural sustainability interact (Corbin Sies 2014). The concept will
have to be defined and applied in a way that will fit local needs while
nesting them within concerns that affect the globe as a whole. While the
‘Advanced Economies’ may at times be allies in moving toward sustain-
able development, their agendas should not dictate African aspirations in
this regard—even though they often hold the purse strings and drive the
dominant discourse.
We recognize that heritage will be but one, albeit an important one, of
many interlocking arenas which will need to be considered. Heritage is
often positioned within development discourses as a benevolent force,
but it can be divisive or exclusionary functioning to normalize and
historicize inequalities of many kinds. Therefore, we must develop an
ontological politics of heritage that remains deeply critical and suspicious
of its deployment and its developmental capacities (Harrison 2015: 39).
Finally, in Africa and globally, scholars must give the nature and condi-
tions of ‘sustainable development’ agendas critical attention as important
questions need to be addressed concerning how its rhetorical deploy-
ment by states and developmental agencies is recoding and transforming
cultural forms inherited from the past and what this means in terms
of how the future is imagined (Keitumetse 2011; Daly and Winter
2012). The contributions to this volume move us toward these aims, but
much work lies ahead of us to conceptualize, operationalize, and inter-
nalize these ideas while recognizing that the lack or delay of effective
implementation comes at considerable cost.
Heritage and Communities

The involvement of community in heritage management is now
frequently called for, but we have learned that this is not necessarily
easy or without its own problems. Nonetheless, it has become apparent
that when many different stakeholders, with varied attitudes, interests,
and positions converge around a particular expression of heritage, those
who become most marginalized in decision-making are usually those
most directly involved with and affected by said heritage. Despite the
many good intensions, and a handful of ‘best practice cases’ our ability
to involve community members in the management of heritage is still
poor (Boswell 2011; Little and Borona 2014). Our inadequateness is
partly due to our management practices. In particular, the languages and
terms that we use are a major hindrance for equal or equitable partic-
ipation. An asymmetry in cultural capital belies the common reference
to ‘stakeholders’ with its suggestion of equality. Heritage practitioners
struggle to meaningfully incorporate ‘local’ people who do not speak
the same ‘language’ and who do not recognize themselves as ‘stake-
holders’ (Abunga 2016: 1; Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016: 3; Sørensen,
forthcoming). Too often, even when power-sharing is called for, ‘commu-
nity’ inclusion becomes tokenistic and problems prevail or increase
(Leonard and Lebogang 2018). When the ‘community’ does not func-
tion in an ennobled ‘democratic’ fashion but rather features unjust,
hierarchical, and/or sexist features, fostering ‘participation’ becomes
further fraught with difficulty—and unveils the series of choices which
lie behind ‘participation’ (Klitgaard 1994: 96).
Variations on the challenges around heritage and communities are
found in the case studies discussed by several of the chapters in this
volume. One of the key themes that bind these contributions is the
difficulty defining the ‘community’ or even the ‘communities.’ Often,
the ‘community’ is taken as a given without examining what it is that
defines them and their relationship to the heritage in question—is it
based on geographical proximity, longevity of connection, active use, or
some other factor? While the terms ‘stakeholders’ and ‘interested and
affected communities’ are frequently cited in policy documents, they
remain unclear and are often highly problematic. The application of such
terms may even result in a tendency to essentialize and instatiate homog-

enized understandings of such groups and/or they call upon certain
individuals to represent the whole. The boundaries of such groups are
blurry—where does a community start and end? What happens when a
community is geographically dispersed or displaced? What are the impli-
cations when multiple communities lay claim to the same heritage? It is
clear that heritage has the potential to become a site of ‘fierce struggle
and impassioned debate’ often centered around questions of who consti-
tutes the community and who exercises the power to define its identity
(Duncan 1995: 8).
An additional challenge that regards community involvement arises
from the changing demography of Africa. In 2013, Africa had 200
million people between the ages of 15 and 24, making it the youngest
population in the world (Ighobor 2013). Moreover, this is an increasingly
urbanizing demographic which is defined in part by its relationship with
digital technologies. These trends have profound implications for the
relationships of youth to their communities, traditional leaders, and their
heritage. An important question moving forward as Collard and Lane’s
chapters highlight will be how to engage youth in heritage management
to address their needs and concerns without undermining traditional
authorities and/or the intergenerational knowledge transmission prac-
tices which have previously enabled the perpetuation of certain forms
of heritage. This intergenerational aspect is perhaps particularly perti-
nent to Africa, but contributions by Blackmore, Boonzaier, Keitumetse,
King et al., Ndlovu, and Taha make the broader point that contem-
porary heritage practice in Africa and beyond, seems to be caught at
times, between the conflicting agendas of employing expert knowledge,
recognizing traditional social hierarchies, and seeking to democratize
heritage management through the empowerment of previously marginal-
ized groups within those communities.
While local communities’ right to and expert knowledge about their
own cultures have become widely recognized, there can also be a danger
of idealizing this connection. In certain contexts, local people have no
connection to, may reject, or are not interested in ‘their heritage.’ In such
cases, there is little motivation for forward planning for heritage, even if
these aim at their ‘benefit.’ The effect of historical disruptions on people’s
connections to place and practice must be recognized and factored into

our understanding of the ‘local’ relationships to heritage. This, more-
over, is neither just a concern for Africa but is a wider phenomenon,
nor is it due only to colonialism but is also a result of war, displace-
ments of people, droughts, and starvations. It has become obvious that,
for example, the urban poor, the millions of displaced people, and other
disenfranchised communities do not have straightforward relationships
to heritage. For some, the estrangement from their heritage has resulted
in a sense of disinheritance. Indeed, the displacement caused by ‘fortress’
style conservation which resulted in the relocation of an estimated 14
million people on the continent seems to have contributed to this trend
(Dowie 2009: xxi). Rendering heritage out of bounds has damaged rela-
tionships to it. Such practices often involve imposing someone else’s
vision on the landscape, and they are therefore regarded as paternalistic
by people whose contact history with such places and/or the institutions
that safeguard them has been one of exclusion and condescension.
Deep ruptures in people’s connection with place will affect their
sense of heritage. In such circumstances, social memory and history
are shallow, connections to a place of origin/home may have been
radically severed, and there is no recognized or known history in the
landscape around communities while connections to a current ‘home’
remain under construction. However, displacement can also breed new
and hybrid forms of identity which rely heavily on and foster new forms
of heritage (Lane, this volume). In some cases, displacement even appears
to have rendered group and community identities stronger as a longing
for a lost home or family members and/or the performance of heritage
become key survival techniques. In other instances, repeated ruptures
often coupled with the loss of key memory holders (elders, custodians,
practitioners) have damaged collective and institutional memory. In cases
where heritage is regarded to be restricting aspirations—for example,
when the adherence to tradition is perceived to deny coevalness, when
new identities have been adopted which are no longer compatible with
older identities (e.g., the rise of more radical forms of Islam or Chris-
tianity), or when new identities are regarded as fragile or unsettling (e.g.,
displaced and migrant communities)—related heritage might be outright
rejected or suppressed (e.g., Mire 2011; Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016). In
such contexts, community outreach engagement in Africa faces layered

resistance and distinct problems. Variations on these challenges are found
in the case studies discussed by several of the chapters in this volume.
To engage and reach such disenfranchised populations in terms of
heritage requires special efforts; but it also calls for honesty in recog-
nizing that not all communities have strong bonds with heritage. The
‘voices’ of such communities often need to find champions, but this
always brings a risk of alienation and distortion. Forward planning is
difficult and risky, and there is often a tendency for local communities
to either take a conservative approach as they find security in the known,
or, alternatively, they jettison their uniqueness in reverence for external
expertise or in their quest for aspirational lifestyles.
There are, nonetheless, distinct qualities in community engagement
in many parts of Africa, some hardly explored but others not just setting
new standards of good practice (e.g., Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016), but
also challenging some of the fundamentals of global heritage philoso-
phies. Take for example the concept of intangible heritage, as defined
by UNESCO. How Africa’s living heritage is recognized, managed,
and performed, radically questions how well we understand the nature
and character of heritage. Does this version of heritage have a vibrant,
agentic transcendental efficacy and performative ability, that is beyond
the reach of current categorizations? Our formal understanding of intan-
gible heritage focuses on craft and a knowledge tradition, on the living
expressions inherited from ancestors and the skills to produce traditional
crafts. Despite appearing abstract, this concept relates the intangible to
form (in the sense of outcome), and as a result tends to reify practices and
performances. This means that the underlying enacted and embodied
practices, and the range of economic, mnemonic, material, and obliga-
tory relationships (see King et al., this volume), which enable them, move
out of sight. But living heritage in Africa provides insight into heritage
practices as a matter of being rather than performance. Basu and Modest
have similarly argued that some of the heritage in Africa provide us with
examples of heritage being embodied, metaphysically agentic, or part of
habitus (2014: 9–10). This challenges current terminology and shows
existing categories to be unstable.
If indeed there are such distinctive relations to heritage, it is equally

clear, however, that they do not find equal expression in all parts of
Africa. Why is that the case? In some areas, particularly those with
histories of repeated displacement or trauma, there is less interest in
heritage and at times particular forms of it are even rejected. This may
be due to the prevailing imperative to meet basic needs, how heritage
is presented to communities, which forms of heritage are focused on,
or the ability for local residents to find ways of becoming involved, but
as discussed above it may also be a result of too many violent ruptures
brought on by processes such as slavery, colonialism, armed conflicts,
desertification, urbanization, and development (e.g., Rausch, Lane, and
Blackmore, this volume). While some communities do have linkages to
the deep past, there is an unevenness of connection with, access to, and
engagement with heritage in Africa, as on the other continents. This
suggests that if heritage should be for all, then the future of heritage
cannot just be left as a bottom-up agenda, but neither can it simply be
dictated. While we strongly commend efforts to privilege community
perceptions and aspirations and where possible to engage in knowledge
and power-sharing, we recognize that such approaches are difficult to
execute, sometimes unwanted, and are often problematic given the short
time scales allowed by development-driven heritage work. We therefore
recognize the need for various forms of interaction between commu-
nity members and experts. This point affirms that current categorizations
which underpin hegemonic heritage management agendas and practices
must make way for more tailored approaches and understandings.
Structure of the Volume

The first section of the volume entitled Managing Africa’s Anthropocene
Environment problematizes the culture-nature binary which continues to
underpin dominant heritage management discourse. Although critique
of the separation of natural and cultural heritage is now well-established,
contemporary nature conservation policies and practices in Africa remain
firmly rooted in colonial practices which sought to regulate space and
people. Despite recent shifts, and despite the discord between such arti-
ficial separation and the routine thinking of most communities in Africa,
who do not employ such separation, ‘Fortress Conservation’ of ‘natural
environments’ remains the hegemonic practice. Keitumetse’s chapter
on the Okavango Delta in Botswana highlights how current research
agendas, parachuted management paradigms, and the pursuit of the
international tourist market continue to marginalize alternative under-
standings of heritage and place. She argues that the ‘brand’ of sustainable
development employed further transforms these places—labeled ‘nature
parks’ and ‘game reserves’—into reified wilderness commodities.
Situating his arguments within a broad overview of the challenges
facing Africa’s heritage, Lane posits that because heritage has a dual
‘temporality’—simultaneously being from the past and of the present,
it risks being at times rejected as anti-modern or alternatively is uncrit-
ically mobilized as a resource for sustainable development. However,
given the longue durée of the co-produced African human-ecosystems,
he argues that a detailed understanding of past human-environment rela-
tions may help the continent identify strategies to employ in the face
of climate and population changes. Ndoro’s chapter focuses on contem-
porary large-scale energy and extraction projects which are currently
advocated as means of catalyzing both economic development and
improving human development indicators. Both the scale of these
projects and local understandings of the spaces in which they are being
carried out subvert the imposed culture-nature divide. Furthermore,
the development-conservation binary collapses as development (in the
widest sense of the term) is a condition of the Anthropocene. Therefore,
‘freezing’ places—in the quest to bind them off from change over time
or the people who use them is a problematic option. This requires us to
rethink the current understanding of the compatibility of heritage and
development.
The second section Communities and the Quotidian continues to
re-center people and their everyday practices at the core of a field previ-
ously focused on the celebration of biophysical exceptionality. While the
previous section highlighted the prioritization of ‘natural’ heritage, the
papers in this section investigate the impacts of placing high value on
historic ‘safely dead’ (Chippindale and Baillie 2006) cultural remains

as opposed to everyday mundane forms and aspects of ‘living’ heritage.
Although intangible heritage has come onto the agenda, this concept
as distinct or separate from other forms of heritage does not find reso-
nance in many African contexts. The question remains as to whether
the intangible heritage paradigm can be employed in Africa in a manner
that will help to maintain, transmit, and develop knowledge and tradi-
tions which are crucially embedded in various manifestations of habitus
without reducing the more colorful practices to fetishized and commod-
ified products. Taha’s chapter on the Meroe Dam in Sudan contends
that the mega-development projects currently being carried out across
the continent often require the displacement of populations and their
lifeways (despite the rise in the incorporation of living heritage assess-
ments in mitigation programs, see King et al., this volume)—threatening
both alternative understandings of heritage and the practices that sustain
it—while perpetuating the salvage paradigm.
Displacement is not only a reality associated with large-scale infras-
tructure or natural conservation projects, it remains the dominant model
underpinning the management of cultural or mixed forms of heritage as
well. Due to the internalization of this model, it continues to reverberate
in post-colonial Africa, indicating the urgent need to further decolo-
nize the field as well as the legislation, policies, and institutions which
underpin it. Even when projects are designed to re-assert the value of
pre-colonial heritage, they often result in the perpetuation of Eurocen-
tric understandings of heritage. Ndlovu’s investigation of the heritage
management of the eMakhosini Valley, South Africa, discusses these
challenges. His contribution critiques the discourse of sustainable devel-
opment as it is currently applied within heritage management arguing
that it tends to temporally overvalue past and future uses. He asserts that
heritage should be managed principally to ensure its current values and
to serve contemporary purposes.
This section also queries the role of traditional leaders (who are in
part a product of colonial invented tradition), arguing that heritage
management strategies which celebrate tangible remains or products serve
as means to legitimize their rule and negotiate access to development
organizations, politicians, and their respective funds. Clifford Collard’s
chapter examines the tensions within a community around the tradi-

tional practice of weaving of Kente cloth in an increasingly globalized
marketplace. In contrast to the position taken by traditional leaders, she
argues that for the weavers who live on the brink of economic precarity,
their craft is their livelihood rather than ‘heritage.’ The heritageization
of Kente cloth, she argues, has not ameliorated but rather further jeopar-
dized the livelihoods of practitioners through the marginalization of their
concerns. This section contends that the leveraging of heritage to rein-
force the existing socioeconomic hierarchy is problematic on a continent
already grappling with high Gini coefficients—a point that Boonzaaier
returns to in his epilogue.
The questions of the nature of the relationship between heritage and
livelihood as well as the shifting identity of what it means to be a ‘heritage
expert’ which run through this section are key themes in the contribution
by King, Arthur, and Challis. Drawing on capacity building case studies
in Lesotho and South Africa, they reflect on how calls for the trans-
formation of heritage practice to become more relevant, representative,
inclusive, and accessible are predominantly framed in terms of socioe-
conomic as opposed to epistemological concerns. Attempts have been
made to devolve custodianship in an effort to make heritage tourism
projects sustainable both in economic and conservation terms. However,
the majority of these attempts have only produced temporary employ-
ment opportunities and have not taken ‘non-experts’ seriously in terms
of understanding their heritage or its role in development. The oblig-
atory nature of public engagement in turn often problematically posi-
tions the failures of such projects on the communities themselves. The
authors conclude by outlining key strategies which could enable capacity
building projects to be reimagined to enable sustainable livelihoods and
living heritage.
The final section of the volume is entitled African States and the
Transnational Development Agenda. Building off the discussions of
the notion of community provided in the previous section, it criti-
cally explores the impacts of the move from top-down to bottom-up
approaches to heritage management and development. The contrib-
utors to this section root this shift in: the response to the failures
of structural adjustment policies, changing international heritage and
development discourses, efforts to address narratives and communi-

ties marginalized by the state, and international strategies to by-pass
(certain) African states which were reconfigured as corrupt and inefficient
organs of change. Initiated, directed, honed, and funded by international
actors such projects are rarely truly bottom-up but rather often repack-
aged or presented as such. This new global imperative for community
engagement reconfigures communities as the direct interlocutors of inter-
national funding and expertise. While it is claimed that such a shift assists
with the localization and tailoring of solutions to particular contexts, in
practice it has often resulted in the copy and pasting of both agendas and
‘solutions,’ the parachuting of expertise, the undermining of states, and
the divestment and decoupling of local actors from the support, (decol-
onized) knowledge, and forms of expertise increasingly available through
national and continental networks.
Leloup’s chapter traces the origins and subsequent permutations of the
highly lauded Culture Bank model. This approach was initially conceived
of by a member of the Peace Corps as a means to provide an alterna-
tive for locals in Fombori, Mali, who were increasingly forced to sell
their heritage through the illicit antiquity trade. By depositing artifacts
into a Cultural Bank instead, it was envisioned that local owners would
retain ownership and use rights, while enabling them to secure micro-
loans and leverage the symbolic capital of heritage artifacts for tourism
development and education. Paradoxically, she explores how this system
has controversially been regarded by heritage practitioners to be contin-
uing the financial valuation of heritage inherent in the very form of
trade, which it was seeking to curtail. Her chapter provides an anal-
ysis of the factors contributing to the appropriation (or lack thereof )
of this ‘bottom-up’ model in the quite different contexts provided by
her case study sites in Togo and Benin. Both her chapter, and that by
Blackmore which follows it, query how the value and power of each
object transfer, diffuse, or become magnified by its recontextualization
in collections and/or exhibitions.
The final two chapters in the volume examine the nexus between
the international post-conflict and peace agendas and their intersec-
tions with development and heritage management praxis. Contemporary
mobilization of heritage for post-conflict reconstruction, peacebuilding,
and transitional justice is based on the assumption that the cessation

of armed conflict coupled with such transitional processes will assist
affected nations to move toward democracy and neoliberalism and as a
result—development. Yet, the development process itself has been instru-
mental in both producing and shaping violence (Winton 2004: 179).
Critiques of formal justice mechanisms have called for engagement with
context-specific justice frameworks. Blackmore’s chapter argues that in
scenarios of unstable peace, ‘permanent’ memorials rooted in a Western
memorial tradition, have the potential to crystallize divisive narratives.
Through the provision of an ethnography of production, she argues
that the methodology employed by the Travelling Testimonies exhibi-
tion, created in response to Uganda’s complex recent history, provides
temporary stages for the public negotiation of trauma, justice, and aspi-
rations for peace. She asserts that by beginning with the concerns of those
directly impacted by conflict and then employing the official archive and
expert knowledge to support their needs, evidence-based calls for the
state to instigate change in the present, rather than merely acknowledging
the wrongs of the past, can be mounted.
Rausch’s chapter details how Eritrea, a newly independent state, was
used as a laboratory for ‘holistic development’ at a time when the
international community and white settler communities in Africa and
beyond sought to reimagine colonial heritage under the more benevo-
lent label of ‘shared heritage.’ While Eritrea has embraced its colonial
heritage because it helped to foster its national identity, even if such
a common identity was the result of brutal colonial policies of racial
segregation, it is reluctant to ‘share’ its ownership. He documents how
Asmara’s modernist heritage has become a pawn in the clashes between
Eritrea’s assertion of a national politics of self-reliance and sovereignty
on the one hand, and transnational appeals to post-conflict reconstruc-
tion, nation building, economic development, and poverty reduction
on the other. He argues that the transnational nostalgia for Asmara’s
modern architecture, obscures poverty, hunger, and militarism in the
Horn of Africa as well as attempts to use development to stem migration
from the region. While the international community seems to regard the
current government as a temporary obstruction to achieving its long-
term interests in the region, the Eritrean government has become adept
at exploiting the Western fascination with Asmara to support its own

aspirations while shutting down internationally imposed ‘bottom-up’
initiatives which it regards as divisive. The volume concludes with an
epilogue by Boonzaaier which draws upon the leitmotifs and themes
emerging from the previous chapters. In it he reflects on what issues
relating to heritage, development, and sustainability are specifically rele-
vant to Africa and whether they are distinct to certain parts of the
continent.
Through these subsections and individual chapters, this volume aims
to contribute to the distribution of knowledge about and experiences
with heritage within Africa. Collectively, the individual contributions
provide insight into some of the diversity found across Africa through
the lens of heritage management and in view of the sustainable develop-
ment agenda as well as the desire to involve communities. The chapters
also seek to contribute to ongoing debates by providing policy sugges-
tions that are framed around the belief that we can improve both our
insights and our practices by sharing experiences and debating their
outcomes.
Acknowledgements This volume stems from The African Heritage Chal-

lenges: Development and Sustainability conference which was co-convened
by the University of Pretoria (UP) and Cambridge University’s Heritage
Research Group (HRG) as the latter’s 16th Annual Research Seminar. Funding
came from Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social
Sciences and Humanities, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research,
Cambridge Africa Alborada Research Fund, The British Institute in Eastern
Africa, and UP’s Capital Cities Institutional Research Theme. This enabled
the financing of seven scholars from Africa (flights, accommodation, fees) and
to charge a subsidized fee for students. The aims of the conference were to
explore how heritage can promote, secure, or undermine sustainable develop-
ment in Africa, and in turn, how this affects conceptions of heritage. It also
aimed to challenge the seemingly dichotomous relationships between preserva-
tion and development, conservation, and innovation in Africa. A subsidiary
aim was to extend existing scholarly networks and links. An open call for
papers was made after which members of the CHRG selected the final contri-
butions. We would like to thank everyone who helped to make the conference
and this volume possible. Leanne Philpot and Elana Theunissen deserve special
thanks for their editorial assistance. This chapter acknowledges support from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation contribution to the Architecture, Urbanism
and the Humanities Initiative at the Wits City Institute based at the Univer-
sity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the Capital Cities Institutional
Research Theme at the University of Pretoria. Opinions expressed in this
chapter are those of the authors and are not necessarily attributed to the funders
and/or respective institutions.
Notes
1. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/&order=regionconsulted 29th January 2018.
2. Available at: https://ocpa.irmo.hr/about/Accra_Declaration-en.pdf.
3. The IMF uses this term to describe 37 nations which were previously
regarded as ‘developed’ nations (Singer 2002: 2).
4. See, e.g., UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001),
the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
(2003), and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the
Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005).
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Managing Africa’s Anthropocene
Environment
Needle in a Haystack? Cultural Heritage
Resources in Designated Nature
Environments of Southern Africa
Susan O. Keitumetse
The Dissected Environments of Southern

Africa’s Protected Areas
The word ‘conservation’ is a popular term in southern Africa. However,
it is rarely associated with cultural heritage resources. Why? Most of
southern African protected landscapes were set up for natural resource
protection and preservation during colonial times, and their post-
colonial conservation strategies are therefore perceived through the
lens of nature-based, environmental indicators to the exclusion of
culture-based indicators. Similarly, the word ‘environment’ as ascribed
to southern Africa’s supposedly untouched pristine wilderness and
wildlife areas is also not popularly associated with cultural- and heritage
resources. Of even greater concern, the cultural and heritage dimensions
S. O. Keitumetse (B)
Okavango Research Institute, University of Botswana, Maun, Botswana
e-mail: keitumetses@ub.ac.bw

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_2
48 S. O. Keitumetse
of the environment are rarely perceived as resources with the poten-

tial to support environmental conservation strategies in southern Africa.
This is perhaps because they are regarded as the products of human
change to the environment, in contrast to natural resources which are
perceived to be part of nature. These perceptions result in a situation
in which southern African cultural heritage resources are continuously
subsumed (in both theory and practice) within natural resource protec-
tion strategies, rather than being considered in their own right. Therein
lies the needle (cultural heritage resources) in the haystack (natural land-
scapes). This chapter discusses this ‘needle and haystack’ relationship
in three sections. The What Constitutes the Haystack? section illustrates
how nature-based concepts and practices in southern Africa’s protected
areas have become dominant over time—eventually overshadowing the
recognition and protection of cultural resources. The Finding the Needle
section explores how the needle that is cultural heritage could be made to
‘shine’ through an examination of the case study of the Okavango Delta
in Botswana. Finally, the chapter concludes by synthesizing the concepts
and suggesting a way forward.
A few terms require clarification for the purposes of this chapter:
The term ‘environment’ describes all of the products of life that have
ever existed in a biophysical landscape and influenced its composition—
including human activity. However, most southern African environ-
mental conservationists’ perception of the term ‘environment’ is focused
on ‘nature’ even though human beings have been and continue to select
what lives on (as heritage), be it natural or cultural remnants.
The term ‘conservation’ generally refers to sustainable use of resources,
whereby resource use is permitted at a monitored pace. In southern
Africa, the word conservation is rarely applied in the context of cultural
heritage resources but is regularly employed for natural resources.
Finally, the term ‘management’ in the broader conservation field
refers to the use and maintenance of either natural and/or cultural
aspects of the environment. Over the years, the term has been adopted
from the corporate context and has become widely associated with the
safeguarding of the environment. In southern Africa, environmental
‘management’ is mostly applied to scenarios in which the government
and local residents and/or communities seek to leverage resources for
Needle in a Haystack? Cultural Heritage Resources … 49
tourism. The application of this parachuted idea of management can

entail both negative and positive outcomes. In most of southern Africa,
the exclusion of cultural heritage resources from conservation has been
heavily influenced by the dynamics of nature-tourism, whereby wildlife
and wilderness are viewed as ‘enough’ to satisfy the tourists. I have
discussed elsewhere why the omission of cultural resources in conserva-
tion discourses does not lead to sustainable environmental conservation
in the long run (Keitumetse 2016c).
What Constitutes the Haystack?
Haystacks, in the context of this chapter, are approaches, policies,

and other strategies that obscure a focus on aspects of cultural
heritage resources in the broader environmental conservation discourse
of southern Africa. These ‘haystacks’ are diverse, and they range from
disciplinary approaches to conservation knowledge production, policy
frameworks within both national and international contexts, the polit-
ical status of areas under consideration, the economic needs of the area,
as well as the biophysical properties of the concerned landscapes.
Disciplinary Haystack
Advocacy for both natural and cultural heritage conservation is largely

active at the discipline level and act through a process whereby scholars
and practitioners identify ambiguities or inadequacies in policy and
design research questions that address such loopholes. The primary disci-
plines in question are archaeology, anthropology, and sociology. Policy,
whether national or international, is informed by existing research liter-
ature as well as (documented) practitioner experiences. In the general
context of southern Africa, this is true of natural resources manage-
ment policies that are substantially backed by findings and experiences
from both the research and activism of Non-Governmental Organi-
sations (NGOs) such as the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to mention
50 S. O. Keitumetse
a few key players. However, with the exception of archaeological arti-

facts, very little is addressed in terms of broader issues pertaining to
conservation of cultural heritage resources, leading to minimal and/or
passive reference to these resources during the process of policy formu-
lation for environmental landscape conservation (Keitumetse 2016b).
This neglect can be attributed to both national and international stake-
holders in conservation, but it is equally a contribution of the disciplines
that feed cultural heritage studies. Representatives of these disciplines
are consistently absent from international environmental conservation
debates (cf. Keitumetse 2011). The disciplines that feed cultural heritage
policy are all involved in a non-committal relationship with the field of
environmental conservation. This passive engagement results in minimal
contribution of cultural heritage studies when compared with the ‘heavy
weight’ that the sciences have become in the context of ‘nature’ conser-
vation. Therefore, cultural heritage resources, even where they are in
abundance in certain areas, attract minimal to no attention when envi-
ronmental policy is formulated.
Policy Haystack
As outlined in earlier publications (Keitumetse and Pampiri

2016; Keitumetse 2016b), the platforms within which cultural heritage
management policy is formulated are isolated and scattered. Interna-
tional policy frameworks, in the form of international conventions, do
not nurture a combined/simultaneous implementation of the various
related conventions about the management of both natural and cultural
resources when they are found in what are deemed to be ‘natural’
landscapes. Each convention is ratified and implemented in isolation
from the rest. Their approach then spills over into, and is mirrored
by, national conservation strategies that also reify the two as separate
resource categories when it comes to ministerial placements, policy
enhancements, etc. International policy also filters into national policy,
local implementation, and civic advocacy reinforcing the disconnected
approach to the conservation of southern African protected landscapes
that host a variety of resources, but which continue to be presented
as ‘wilderness’ and ‘wildlife’ areas only (see Fig. 1) by international
conventions.
Fig. 1 Map showing places of cultural value within the Okavango Delta
‘wilderness’ and ‘wildlife’ designated area (Credit: Susan O. Keitumetse 2020)
Political Haystack
Large parts of Africa are facing conditions of war and/or conflict that
make it difficult to access so-called wilderness areas to acknowledge
and inventory (map) cultural heritage values. These conflicts have also
displaced large swathes of the populations in countries such as the
DRC, Angola, and Mozambique from their cultural landscapes. The
mapping of sites must then be based on memory rather than through
direct engagement with the landscape, making claims and recollections
fragile and easily ignored or challenged. Another side of the political
haystack affecting African protected areas results from the reluctance of
African governments to engage with questions of social identity due to
a fear of rising land reclamation claims by tribal communities. More-
over, most of the lands that sustain nature-based tourism are leased out
to private foreign investors (cf. Keitumetse 2016a). While this protects
52 S. O. Keitumetse
governments’ economic and political investments, it thwarts human

connectedness to these environments. This culminates in the affected
communities developing indifference to, and even becoming resentful of,
the protected areas resulting in actions that cause environmental degra-
dation as illustrated by the case of Kilimanjaro, Kenya (Maathai 2004),
or the poaching in countries such as Botswana, Zimbabwe, Kenya,
Namibia, South Africa, Angola, and the DRC (cf. Henk 2005; Maingi
et al. 2012; Büscher and Ramutsindela 2015).
The Economic Haystack
‘Wilderness’ and ‘wildlife’ spaces in southern Africa are frequently

regarded as cash-accruing geographies enabling most governments to
disregard other resources that may not be perceived as equally econom-
ically viable. Cultural heritage resources are regularly perceived this
way by experts from other disciplines with limited capacity to deci-
pher their potential economic (and other) benefits. The negative impact
of this economic lens is exasperated by the acute subsistence needs of
affected communities. This position makes it difficult for communities
to defend a resource that bears a delayed gratification potential, against
those resources that provide instant gratification and thus affect their
day-to-day survival.
Biophysical (Natural) Environment Haystack
In addition to the human-made conditions outlined above, researching,

inventorying, and maintaining cultural heritage in these spaces are diffi-
cult because of the dangers posed by animals, and this results in human
signatures becoming inaccessible. In the protected national parks and
game reserves of southern Africa, such areas’ safety concerns keep social
science researchers at bay or make it difficult for them to inventory the
cultural heritage components of these places. In the more politicized
conservation areas, the exaggerated requirements of ‘wilderness’ conser-
vation are even at times used as a weapon to keep other sectors away, thus
making it difficult to inventory and/or overlay cultural heritage aspects
on landscapes that are otherwise known as natural environments.
Finding the Needle, Maneuvering the Haystack
Despite these ‘haystacks,’ there are various strategies to locate and make
known the ‘needles’ that are the cultural heritage resources. To start with,
a change in perception is needed. A first step toward this is a change
of language. A terminology that expresses the relationships between the
so-called natural environment and cultural heritage resources in more
profound ways has to be adopted. Over time this shift entails a change
in the way that cultural resources are viewed and engaged with in rela-
tion to what is now termed the ‘nature parks’ and ‘game reserves’ of
southern Africa. One of the key perceptions that needs to be embraced is
‘heritage IN the environment ’ rather than ‘heritage AND the environment.’
Since the word ‘environment’ is already perceived to favor the natural
resources, the change to the former phrase emphasizes that cultural and
natural heritage aspects are intertwined, that cultural components are
embedded within, and embody features of the environment. The latter
phrase, in contrast, signals the prevailing perception of cultural heritage
resources as existing outside of the environment, thus allowing isolation
of the disciplinary, policy, economic, and biophysical platforms of devel-
opment implementation. Such steps may appear simplistic, but they can
be effective and are needed to change the ways in which the relationships
between nature and culture are talked about and thus perceived.
The next step after a change in perception is conducting applied
research to illustrate that, indeed, cultural resources are inherent within
the broader environment as we perceive and understand it today. One
example of such research has already been conducted by the author,
with the explicit aim of mapping cultural values in the Okavango Delta
wetland of Northern Botswana. The case study, as described below,
briefly illustrates this research.
Case Study Findings: Mapping Cultural Values

in the Okavango Delta Wetland
This case study illustrates a way of moving beyond theoretical arguments
by implementing certain practical changes that can be pursued. The case
54 S. O. Keitumetse
study is concerned with how the hidden cultural significance (needle) in

supposedly ‘natural landscapes’ (haystack) can be properly recognized—
a first step toward helping to ensure that it can be protected. Figure 1
and the descriptions in Table 1 show the results of a preliminary cultural
mapping exercise which draws upon the memory of affected commu-
nity members in the wetland (waterbody) ‘haystack’ of the Okavango
Delta World Heritage Site in Botswana. The research, which is on-
going, demonstrates that what currently appears to be a vast ‘wilderness’
and ‘wildlife’ sanctuary also contains sociocultural meanings even in the
absence of contemporary human occupation. The research also shows
that although people may have been relocated from the wetland, they
still harbor memories of what was where (Keitumetse and Pampiri
2016). This knowledge can be used to re-construct people’s symbolic
and memorial associations with the landscape. In turn, this process
enables people to re-connect their cultural and communal identity with
the geographic space, providing them with the means to heighten their
sense of connection, belonging, and consequently cultural responsibility
toward a particular landscape, which could result in improvement of
their social well-being.
The mapping exercise richly illustrates the future potential to interpret
both the nature and culture of this landscape. A selection of the features
on this map is described in Table 1. The numbers refer to mapped human
occupations (cultural places) in the supposedly ‘natural’ Okavango Delta.
This case study of the mapping of the Okavango Delta’s cultural
attributes illustrates that some of the landscapes that are commonly
branded as ‘nature-tourism’ landscapes host cultural heritage attributes.
This reveals that these environments are not just pristine wilderness areas
that team with wildlife. They have a human- and cultural footprint.
The mapped cultural attributes of the popular ‘natural’ landscape of
the Okavango illustrate that management approaches, such as applied
research, can expose cultural attributes that can later on be juxtaposed
alongside nature aspects to provide a more inclusive interpretation of the
Okavango landscape. By so doing visitors and/or international tourists’
experiences of the landscape may be enhanced. Also, the approach helps
to improve and diversify engagement of residents or local communities
with the protected landscape as they are better enabled to connect with
Table 1 Descriptions of some of the places of cultural significance found within

the Okavango Delta World Heritage Site (ODWHS) depicted in Fig. 1. ODWHS
is popularly known as a natural landscape and predominantly used for nature-
tourism
Description of communal cultural identity places on
Number (#) on map the map
#47 depicts Xaxaba commercial camp—the camp derived its name
from the local communities’ name for an island they
called XouXaba
(motlhaba/mochabawaditou)—meaning sand of/or
eaten by elephants
#49 depicts Area called Kakanaga/Xaxanaga (Bushmen
language)—the island is deserted now. Settlers
moved from the island to another area called
Sedibana in 1975 so that they could form a bigger
village to access government amenities. It was
inhabited mainly by people of Wayeyi origin
#51 depicts Area called Jukujuku (an onomatopoeic name
reflecting the sound of the water as it moves
through the lake). People came up with this name
after observing the flow of water indicating a
people-environment relationship in the past. The
feature is described by community members as a very
deep lagoon (lekadiba le leboteng in the local
language). The area was used by Bayei and river
Bushmen as a camp site during their travels across
the Okavango Delta. The communities never settled
here but used it as a waypoint on their way to other
villages in the vast delta landscape. The island is
remembered as not having had enough land space
for settlement as it floods. It is remembered as a
place where people lost a lot of canoes and goods
when their boats capsized
#52–53 depicts Area called Ntshwarelangwana (hold the baby for
me)—the name derives from a folk tale about a
woman who gave her child to a hyena (Phiri
Setswana and umpuru in Seyei) in the dark, thinking
that it was her husband. In 1971 people moved from
the island to a place called Sedibana to pave the way
for tourism activities, and to be in an area where
government could provide them with modern
amenities
(continued)
56 S. O. Keitumetse
Table 1 (continued)
Description of communal cultural identity places on
Number (#) on map the map
#54–55 Area called Tshao or water that flows (metsi-a-elelang)
as opposed to the stagnant water in the lagoon. In
the past it was a camp or settlement for the Bayei.
The community informants narrate that the island
used to be large enough to have an airstrip but
changes in weather patterns have seen water
encroachment, reducing its land mass
#55–56 Xeedau or Xhoedau—former river San/Bushmen
settlement
#60 Xhooisland
#64–68 Mamweresite. The Mamwere, according to a folk-tale
of the Bayei ethnic groups, is a mystical woman who
inhabited the middle of the Okavango Delta
centuries ago. The general location of her territory is
at a confluence of two big rivers lying between a
lagoon and an island with a palm tree (mokolwane)
that ‘never dies’. The island is known to elders who
travelled the river using traditional canoes when they
were younger. They identify the place as a special
place where one could rest over-night if it got too
late in the day to continue on their journeys.
Currently the place is completely surrounded by
water except for small pockets of land, one of which
is described as the mythical woman’s home
their past. In turn, stronger connections to their past may affect how
visitors perceive these contemporary communities, and this may make it
possible to interact with the international visitors who flock to southern
Africa’s protected national parks and game reserves, such as the Okavango
Delta World Heritage Site (ODWHS), in new and more varied ways.
Conclusion: Finding the Cultural Needle

in Nature’s Haystack
This chapter highlighted and discussed factors that often lead to southern
Africa’s cultural resources remaining obscured in protected landscapes
as these are perceived to carry only natural value and significance.
The discussions in the chapter further illustrate how African cultural
heritage resources practitioners can address the lack of acknowledg-

ment, identification, and inclusion of cultural resources in environmental
conservation, through engagements such as applied research as illus-
trated through the Okavango Delta case study above. An ingrained
bias toward a branding of protected areas as landscapes of untouched
nature and wilderness in southern Africa continues to prevent the
recognition and acknowledgment of the cultural heritage components
of national parks and game reserves. The production of knowledge
through the type of research highlighted through the Okavango Delta
case study provides a point of departure that can lead to the inclusion
of cultural attributes (archaeological, anthropological, ethnological, and
historical) within these well-known ‘natural’ landscapes. Beyond recogni-
tion, cultural attributes of these landscapes can then be factored into their
interpretation and management and be explored both for community
well-being and for their interactions with tourism. In this way, sustain-
able conservation can be achieved because the recognition of the cultural
attributes of these landscapes increases their environmental protection
indicators. An increase and a diversity of environmental indicators allows
for environmental monitoring to cover a high number of assessment
points, consequently enhancing the broader environmental conservation.
The haystacks outlined in the first section of this chapter illus-
trate how a point of departure for bringing together the cultural and
natural resource discourses on conservation can be identified. One of the
practical ways to achieve balanced interpretation of supposedly natural
landscapes is to develop a deliberate applied research approach that
embraces meaningful engagement of other disciplines (multidisciplinary)
such as cultural heritage-based ones to assess attributes related to their
areas of focus. This approach is illustrated by the findings in Fig. 1
and Table 1, that brought out attributes of cultural significance within
a supposedly pristine wilderness and wildlife landscape that is included
in the World Heritage list as a purely ‘natural’ site. More specifically, the
paper argues that a number of designated strategies should be developed
and adopted going forward, among these the following four strategies
should be highlighted:
Firstly, the nature-culture dichotomy, evident in the current ‘wildlife’
and ‘wilderness’ management framework inherent in most of southern
58 S. O. Keitumetse
African, excludes other resources that are crucial in providing different

conservation indicators to enhance landscape preservation. This frame-
work needs to be changed both theoretically and in practice. For existing
World Heritage Sites, practitioners may need to revisit the original
designation of areas as either ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’ landscapes, to assess
whether they can be re-designated as ‘mixed sites’ as this allows for
both nature-culture acknowledgment and recognition. Overlaying the
2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible
Cultural Heritage within sites where the UNESCO 1972 Convention on
World Heritage has already been implemented, is another way to balance
representation of all resource indicators in protected nature landscapes.
Studies have shown that the disconnect between the two conventions
often leads to negative impacts on the various cultural heritage forms that
UNESCO is purporting to conserve (see Keitumetse and Nthoi [2009]
on the Tsodilo World Heritage Site, Botswana and Kim’s 2016 case study
of the Hahoe village, Korea).
Perusal of various case studies helps to reveal how common an imbal-
anced emphasis on natural and cultural elements is, and also provides
hints at new approaches. For instance, in Tanzania, in the Serengeti
National Park, residents were relocated to enable and enhance the preser-
vation of ‘wildlife’ and ‘wilderness.’ In contrast, in the Ngorongoro
Crater National Park, Tanzania, people still reside alongside the wild
animals, indicating that an enforced relocation is not always necessary.
These two examples illustrate that both approaches have been tried and
tested, with advantages and disadvantages available for us to learn from
when shaping future conservation models.
In addition to protected areas, there are other natural resource policy
instruments which can be used to enhance the safeguarding of cultural
heritage. The 1971 Ramsar Convention on wetlands is one example of
an instrument that has already attempted to mainstream components
of cultural heritage in landscapes otherwise regarded as natural in form.
The Ramsar Convention’s chapter on the ‘Cultural heritage of wetlands’
provides a guide on how to consider alternative resources when managing
wetlands. However, for most of the relevant instruments, much still
needs to be done, and some of the existing conventions, such as the 1992
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), would be an ideal candidate
for review with a view to change toward a balanced interpretation of

environmental landscapes.
Secondly, most of southern Africa’s protected areas are interpreted
either as natural resources or as tourist assets. Tourism by its very nature
transforms landscapes into a capitalist concern, and the substantial
revenue accrued from nature-tourism makes it difficult for practitioners
to consider other (e.g., cultural) values attached to such environments.
It is, therefore, important that the ‘sustainable interpretation’ of land-
scapes is considered so that broader environmental assessment indicators
for conservation monitoring can be accounted for. The International
Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) charter on interpretation
(2008) defines ‘sustainable interpretation’ as that which enables intellec-
tual access and understanding; uses and draws upon accepted scholarly
methods and living traditions; covers a wider context and setting;
respects authenticity; has sustainability as a central goal; includes heritage
stakeholders in their entirety; and engages in continuing research,
training, and evaluation of site identities. Such aspirations should be
made commonplace and part of routine engagement with protected
areas. This will add to several layers of meaning and values and help to
highlight the cultural attributes of landscapes, as well as ensure more in-
depth nature appreciation, more meaningful and new forms of tourism,
and local engagement.
Thirdly, research-based conservation approaches are proving to be
very effective tools in developing countries (see CRM: The Journal
of Heritage Stewardship by National Park Service, first issue 2003).
Collaborative-multidisciplinary applied research in ‘natural’ landscapes
is crucial for enhanced conservation. It is important to recognize that
whereas attempts to change conservation attitudes, mainly implemented
through a focus on practical strategies, have tended to fail, research-based
approaches promise alternative choices. This is because practice-based
approaches have failed due to a lack of understanding of baseline concep-
tual issues that could have been fleshed-out through research—this is
evidenced by the case study on the Okavango Delta presented above
where only ‘natural’ attributes of the landscape were acknowledged and
touted as being representative of the landscape, but the understandings
60 S. O. Keitumetse
provided by other disciplines are excluded. As such this chapter empha-

sizes the relevance of multidisciplinary collaborative research that has the
potential to inform policy on a much broader scale than hitherto has
been the norm.
The literature on sustainable development identifies two broad cate-
gories: ‘weak’ sustainability which uses human capital as an indicator
(Biely et al. 2018), and ‘strong’ sustainability which relies on nature
capital as an indicator (Pearce and Atkinson 1993; Gutés 1996; Ayres
et al. 1998). The former is popularly attributed to a concern with
sustaining development from a human perspective, whereas the latter is
commonly attributed to sustaining the environment from a biophysical
point of view. Of these two categories, cultural heritage resources fall
under the human capital category. However, as the terminology indi-
cates, these forms of sustainability focus primarily on economic values, a
standpoint which is criticized by some scholars because it fails to consider
the cultural values imbued in the environment (cf. Chan et al. 2012). To
aim toward the sustainable engagement of cultural heritage resources, it
is important that the relationship between the ‘haystack’ (natural envi-
ronment) and ‘needle’ (cultural resources) is constantly monitored and
evaluated in order to allow for the formulation of solutions that strike
a balance between both of these resources’ visibility and recognition in
environmental conservation practice.
Policy Suggestions
1. Inventorying of the cultural heritage of National Parks and conser-
vation areas through research-based conservation approaches is a
valuable first step toward encouraging a more balanced interpretation
of these landscapes.
2. ‘Wildlife’ and ‘wilderness’ spaces need to become regarded as more
than tourism assets. They are also resident communities’ identity
spaces.
3. Existing designations should be re-examined in light of their cultural
attributes and existing policies should be re-worked to break down
the nature-culture divide which they reify.
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African Cultural Heritage and Economic
Development: Dancing in the Forests
of Time
Paul J. Lane
Introduction: Framing Heritage Challenges

Heritage, whether African or otherwise, is an elusive concept that is hard
to tie down. There are dominant views on what constitutes both natural
and cultural heritage, just as there are dominant understandings of
tangible versus intangible heritage, all of which are accompanied by a raft
of governmental legislative frameworks, institutions, proscriptions, and
systems for attributing value to those ‘things’ called heritage. This Autho-
rised Heritage Discourse (AHD), as Laurajane Smith (2006: 11) termed
it, is now routinely contrasted with other evaluations and philosophies
of heritage that coexist alongside AHD, and attribute heritage signif-
icance in different ways and oftentimes to different kinds of ‘things.’
As countless case studies have shown in recent decades, these ‘other’
P. J. Lane (B)
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: pjl29@cam.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_3
64 P. J. Lane
heritage discourses typically question key notions of ‘universal value’ that

underpin much of what AHD is about.
This paper offers a series of vignettes on some of these issues as they
relate principally to ‘cultural heritage,’ so as to highlight some of the key
challenges that Africa’s heritage professionals may have to face over the
coming decades. I focus on six broad, yet-interlinked topics (Table 1) so
as to explore, on the one hand, some of the epistemological and onto-
logical issues relating to ideas of indigenous knowledge and non-AHD
constructs of heritage and cultural empowerment, and, on the other, the
practical challenges of integrating heritage protection, conservation, and
monitoring into enabling resilient and sustainable societies and environ-
ments. My main argument is that if these challenges are to be negotiated
successfully (by which I mean so as to minimize detrimental effects on
cultural heritage), they are likely to require organizational changes, the
redirection of research activities and management resources, and greater
intellectual scrutiny than has sometimes been the case heretofore. I make
no claim that this list is comprehensive—and other contributors to this
volume make equally pertinent suggestions.
Table 1 Heritage challenges for Africa (Compiled by author)

Challenge 1 Determining the epistemological basis of indigenous
archaeologies, and their heritage consequences
Challenge 2 How to write, tell, and present unsettled histories in a
manner that fosters mutual understanding and
recognition of the contributions made to today’s society
by different communities, without glossing over the
consequences of more painful legacies
Challenge 3 Thinking more creatively about how an understanding of
the past can help us plan for a better, more
environmentally sustainable future
Challenge 4 Historicising African Indigenous Knowledge systems through
integrated cross-disciplinary research and identifying their
role in enhancing socio-ecological and cultural resilience
Challenge 5: How to better integrate heritage protection, conservation,
and monitoring into the planning systems at local,
regional, and national levels
Challenge 6 Determining the antiquity of African cultural hybridity and
its legacies both on the continent and elsewhere in the
world
African Cultural Heritage and Economic Development … 65
It is important to stress, also, that I approach these issues from my

perspective as a British-trained archaeologist—although I hope one who
has embraced the notion of transdisciplinary research—and as a conse-
quence I give greater weight to challenges that relate to tangible rather
than intangible cultural heritage. This is not meant to diminish the
significance of intangible cultural heritage and the work that has been
and is being done to promote it in different settings on the continent
(e.g., Keitumetse 2006; De Jong 2007; Mire 2007; Nic Eoin and King
2013). However, as will become clear later, I am skeptical about the long-
term value of the distinction between tangible and intangible heritage—
at least as articulated by UNESCO and its supporters—and favor instead
a more holistic perspective (see also, e.g., Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004;
Pétursdóttir 2013).
Heritage Time
As already intimated, the term ‘heritage’ means different things to
different people and has diverse connotations even within related disci-
plines and discourses (Turnpenny 2004; Smith 2004; Vecco 2010;
Pétursdóttir 2013). Literally meaning ‘that which can be inherited,’ the
term is now used to refer to quite diverse entities, including its common
association in archaeology with specific artifacts or sites; its usage within
ecology and conservation to refer to ecosystems and landscapes; and in
anthropology, history and development studies as a synonym for local
tradition and knowledge. Cultural heritage has often been regarded in
a positive light, despite recurrent critiques, as something that needs to
be protected from unrestrained modernization; as a source of pride; as
a way to guide development based on ‘indigenous knowledge’; and as a
resource to promote tourism. None of these are without their partic-
ular problems and challenges, however (e.g., AlSayyad 2001; Holtorf
2006; Boswell and O’Kane 2011; Tengberg et al. 2012; Lafrenz Samuels
2016). Cultural heritage preservation efforts may also have unintended
negative consequences, such as the increased gentrification of urban
neighborhoods and the resulting exclusion of certain groups from access
66 P. J. Lane
to their heritage sites and monuments (Donaldson et al. 2013). Further-

more, the use of scarce financial and human resources to protect and
conserve cultural heritage is sometimes portrayed in a more negative
light, imposing an unaffordable financial burden and drawing resources
away from other more pressing concerns such as the provision of good
public health and education services (Spennemann 1999). It is partly in
response to such negative perceptions of the cost to public finances of
maintaining cultural heritage as a social good that heritage professionals
are now arguing that cultural heritage needs to be ‘put to work’ (see, e.g.,
Bhola 2003; European Union 2015).
Part of the reason why attitudes to cultural heritage can be so ambiva-
lent is due to its dual temporality. As ‘heritage’ it is necessarily of
the past—and in many cases, the past of some considerable time ago.
However, cultural heritage also exists in the present, and whether tangible
or intangible, is something that requires dealing with in our everyday
lives. This dual temporality—a manifestation of tradition in the modern
world—can thus create a perception that cultural heritage works to hold
back progress and development rather than enable these. This may be
taken quite literally, in the sense that archaeological impact assessments
and mitigation work may be considered unnecessarily time-consuming
luxuries that delay construction and mining projects, adding financial
costs to these without any immediately obvious future monetary returns.
This happened, for example, during the construction of the Bui Dam on
the Black Volta River, Ghana in 2007–2011, where the commissioning
authority was reluctant to act on the recommendations for mitigation
work made following an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment
(Fig. 1). As Wazi Apoh and Kodzo Gavua (2016: 207) note, their ‘key
rationale was that shortfalls in electrical power supply and the need to
quickly provide an uninterrupted supply’ were of greater national priority
than protecting the cultural heritage and built environment threatened
by construction activities. The controversy over the process by which
an Australian mining company (Coal of Africa Limited) was awarded
a concession to develop and operate open-cast and underground coal
mining close to the World Heritage Site of Mapungubwe, South Africa,
is another well-documented case (Centre for Applied Legal Studies
2016). Both examples underline the delicate balances that need to be
Fig. 1 Bui Dam, Ghana under construction in 2010 (Photo credit: Wazi Apoh,
August 2010)
found between promoting economic growth and wealth-generation, with

protecting and managing significant cultural heritage resources.
When conceived primarily as something of the past, cultural heritage,
especially with respect to cultural practices and beliefs, may be deemed
anti-modern and retrograde. The destruction on September 11, 2016
of a 190-year-old building in Tinubu Square, Lagos known as Ilojo Bar
seems, for example, to have been motivated by precisely such sentiments
(BellaNaija.com 2016). Formerly also known variously as Angel House
and Casa De Fernendez, the building was the best surviving example of
a style of Brazilian-inspired architecture that was popular in the early
nineteenth century and closely associated with manumitted slaves who
had returned to Nigeria to begin a new life. Despite being a gazetted
monument, the building was destroyed by a developer acting on behalf of
some of the family owners to make way for a commercial development.
Within the context of Africa, with its complex histories of Euro-
pean and other colonial encounters, different heritage traces may also
be valued differently—some despised, deliberately neglected, or even
68 P. J. Lane
destroyed,1 others celebrated as a source of indigenous innovation and

accomplishments, and other traces simply ignored (Fig. 2). However, we
should not forget that the importance of laying claim to a ‘pre-colonial
past’ to demonstrate that African societies had histories that were as
diverse and as rich as those of Europe and North America was a central
part of the process of decolonization. This was clearly recognized by
several of the first generation of leaders of independent African nations.
The best-known example of this is probably the statement made by Sir
Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president, at the University of Botswana,
Lesotho and Swaziland graduation ceremony in 1970:
We should write our own history books to prove that we did have a past,
and that it was a past that was just as worth writing and learning about
as any other. We must do this for the simple reason that a nation without
a past is a lost nation, and a people without a past are a people without
a soul. (cited in Phaladi 1998: 233)
Similar sentiments can be found in the speeches of other first-

generation post-independence African leaders, including President
Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, as for example in his 1962 speech at the
opening of the first Congress of Africanists (Nkrumah 1973: 206–217);
and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania in his opening address at the
International Congress on African History in 1965 (Nyerere 1968: 80–
85), and his speech on ‘The University’s role in the development of the
new countries’ in 1966 (Nyerere 1968: 179–186). The importance of
the past as a source of identity and self-confidence was also central to the
writings of the earliest proponents of Pan-Africanism, including Cheikh
Anta Diop and William Du Bois (MacDonald 2003), while also incor-
porating notions of négritude as developed by Aimé Césaire and Léopold
Senghor (Holl 1990: 301–304). The debates stimulated by the publica-
tion of Black Athena (Bernal 1987) likewise underline the significance
and importance of history and notions about the past in contemporary
constructions of personal and national identity in newly independent
African countries.
The value of promoting and preserving Africa’s diverse cultures and
‘indigenous knowledge’ systems was also given prominence at the start
Fig. 2 a ‘Forgotten heritage’? Remains of a British colonial fort occupied

between 1901 and 1904, at Loiminange, southern end of Lake Baringo, Kenya,
and now a mission site (Photo credit: Paul Lane, April 2017); b Residual frag-
ments of the Bakwena National Office, Ntwseng, Molepolole, Botswana (Photo
credit: Paul Lane, March 2015); c Abandoned tanks from the 2nd (1983–2005)
Sudanese Civil War, Juba, South Sudan (Photo credit: Paul Lane, October 2009)
70 P. J. Lane
of this century by NEPAD—the New Partnership for Africa’s Devel-

opment—which was launched in 2001 at the 37th Summit of the
Organization for African Unity (African Union 2001). More recently, the
creation of an African continent with a strong cultural identity, common
heritage, values, and ethics, in a manner that ensures the restoration and
preservation of Africa’s cultural heritage, has been restated as a key aspi-
ration of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, adopted at its 24th Annual
Ordinary Assembly 30–31 January 2015 (African Union 2015).
In light of these kinds of public political statements on the signif-
icance of heritage and culture for Africa’s development as a continent
and for its individual nation-states, it is somewhat ironic, to say the
least, that the teaching and practice of both archaeology, history, and
critical heritage studies despite such overt statements, have received only
limited government support in most independent African nations. The
lack of both resources and trained personnel has been a recurrent trope in
most commentaries on the state of these disciplines (e.g., Musonda 1990:
11–15; Karega-Mũnene 1996; Mabulla 2000: 212). As if to underline
this devaluing of the importance of history and archaeology by African
governments, Neil Parsons noted over a decade ago that Seretse Khama’s
famous exhortation about the value of the past was frequently being
rendered as: ‘A nation without a culture is a nation without a soul’ in
official references to the speech in Botswana, without any reference to
history (Parsons 2006: 668–669).
Accordingly, cultural heritage professionals working in Africa perhaps
need to consider the implications of these different assessments of the
‘value’ of the continent’s tangible and intangible heritage, and what
lies behind more negative evaluations of the past and its study. As
Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels (2009) has noted for North Africa, and Colin
Breen (2014) for the African continent more generally, archaeology
and heritage management are becoming increasingly linked to strate-
gies aimed at promoting sustainable development and poverty reduction.
While welcoming these developments, both caution against an uncrit-
ical acceptance that local communities will value their heritage in the
same way as heritage professionals, or that they will necessarily agree
that their heritage should be ‘put to work’ for the same reasons or with
the same aims in mind as now being articulated within the heritage
Table 2 Suggested ways to make heritage ‘work’ for different sectors

Economy Promote innovative finance, investment, governance,
management and business models to increase the
effectiveness of cultural heritage as an economic
production factor
Society Promote the innovative use of cultural heritage to encourage
integration, inclusiveness, cohesion and participation
Environment Promote innovative and sustainable use of cultural heritage
to enable it to realise its full potential in contributing to
the sustainable development of... landscapes and
environments
Source European Commission (2015: 8–9)
professions (Table 2). Local communities may even regard the goals of
archaeology and heritage conservation as antithetical to their own beliefs
(Kankpeyeng et al. 2009).
Elsewhere, I have argued that one (of several) potentially key reason(s)
why the contributions—both actual and potential—of archaeological
research are so poorly recognized may lie in the assumption that the
discipline is regarded as being a modernist and largely Western invention
(Lane 2013; see also Eyo 1994 on ambivalent attitudes toward Western
concepts of ‘the museum’). If considered simply as a formal academic
discipline, this may well be true. The birth of archaeology as a profes-
sional practice/distinct discipline in the nineteenth century certainly gave
a particular value to ‘things’ as sources of evidence about the past in a
manner that was founded on a combination of the principles of Newto-
nian physics and Cartesian metaphysics (Thomas 2004). However, it is
well known that individuals throughout the world place considerable
importance on the historical associations of particular objects, build-
ings, and spaces. While it is by no means ‘universal,’ there is also
a growing body of well-documented examples of non-Western soci-
eties using elements of the physical remains of previous inhabitants
of their area in their construction of historical narratives about their
place in that world and their relationship to those previous inhabi-
tants (e.g., Van Dyke and Alcock 2003). These attitudes have also had
important consequences for what has been preserved and why these
particular material remains and not others, as well as how such alter-
native archaeologies2 may be deployed in the management of heritage
72 P. J. Lane
resources today (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2007). Even at

the level of routine practice, decisions such as those entailing repair,
modification, replacement, curation, preservation, or disposal all draw
on specific cultural understanding of the historical value of an object
and the contextual appropriateness of this value.
Recent research on these themes has thus undermined the assumption
that archaeology is an exclusively Western, modernist sensibility. Further-
more, recognition of the importance individuals throughout the world
place on the historical associations of particular objects, buildings, and
spaces, and how they use these in their construction of their own pasts,
opens up the possibility for a reappraisal of how we conceptualize archae-
ological remains and their management (Fig. 3). Unfortunately, the
manner in which historical objects are mobilized by different contempo-
rary societies to construct a ‘past’ has been poorly studied—although a
Fig. 3 Traces of early Dogon villages immediately below Tellem remains

(eleventh to sixteenth century AD), Banani, Bandiagara escarpment Mali. Dogon
have a refined understanding of the chronology of the architectural remains in
their landscape that is used to tie specific lineage histories to particular places
in the landscape (Photo credit: Paul Lane, October 1980)
well-established disciplinary subfield, ethnoarchaeology, must surely be

one of the best research strategies available for identifying the charac-
teristics of different ‘indigenous’ archaeologies and heritage making (see
Lane 2016, and references therein for further discussion). Addressing
such knowledge gaps must now be treated as a research priority.
Indigenizing African Archaeology

The development of ‘Indigenous archaeology’ in North America and
elsewhere over the last few decades is closely linked to the development
of post-colonial perspectives and practices. Sonya Atalay, for example,
has argued that archaeologists, especially those working in former settler
societies and other countries subjected to Western colonialism, need to
develop a ‘collaborative approach that blends the strengths of Western
archaeological science with the knowledge and epistemologies of Indige-
nous peoples’ (Atalay 2006: 301). In a similar vein, George Nicholas
(2010: 233) has stated that failure to incorporate indigenous approaches
within the discipline ‘will limit significantly or marginalise the potential
contributions of archaeology as a more representative and responsible
discipline and constrain its continued intellectual growth.’
A basic feature of these statements is that they draw a contrast between
archaeological approaches to understanding and writing about the past,
and Indigenous constructs of history and the knowledge systems of
which these form a part. In both the cited examples, and in broader
trends within the discipline (Watkins 2000), the goals of promoting
Indigenous archaeology/archaeologies are to celebrate these alternative
strategies; challenge long held assumptions about who has the right,
authority, and power to interpret the past; and wrest exclusive control
over the production and use of archaeological knowledge from the
discipline of archaeology. Beyond this, however, there are considerable
differences between various calls for the development of ‘Indigenous
archaeologies,’ and in the issues they highlight, ranging from contrasting
interpretations of the past, to debates over rights of access, and the repa-
triation of human remains and objects (McNiven 2016). Archaeologists
74 P. J. Lane
also use multiple, and sometimes conflicting definitions of ‘Indige-

nous people’, that may diverge from both formal definitions (such as
those favored by the United Nations) and taken for granted concepts
circulating in the public sphere.
Archaeologists working in Africa have certainly noted that archae-
ology’s ‘governing paradigms and epistemologies often conflict with
African historical needs, views of the past, and ways of structuring time
and space’ (Schmidt 1995: 119). Recognition of this has encouraged
calls for alternative archaeologies (Andah 1995; Pwiti 1996). Nonethe-
less, there have been relatively few explicit calls for the development
of ‘Indigenous archaeologies,’ and instead recent debates have focused
more on the need for the creation of post-colonial archaeological prac-
tices (e.g., Schmidt 2009), the ethical issues this raises (e.g., Shepherd
2015), the mechanisms by which this transformation might be achieved
(e.g., Giblin 2012), and their possible consequences (e.g., Ndlovu 2011).
Where the concept of ‘indigenous archaeology’ (without a capital ‘I’)
has featured in recent discussions, it is usually used somewhat inter-
changeably for different manifestations of archaeological engagement
with ‘the public’ and ‘local’ communities (e.g., Chirikure and Pwiti
2008), or with reference to the importance of ‘indigenous’ or customary
custodianship (e.g., Jopela 2011) and others strands of ‘indigenous
knowledge’ in heritage management and applied archaeology (Stump
2013a). In both regards, the concept of ‘community’ or ‘collaborative’
archaeology seems to be preferred over ‘Indigenous archaeology’ (e.g.,
Chirikure et al. 2010; Almansa et al. 2011; Schmidt 2014; Pikirayi 2014;
Schmidt and Pikirayi 2016). This contrasts with the situation in many
other parts of the world, especially North America and Australasia where
the concept first gained intellectual capital (Watkins 2000).
Defining the term ‘Indigenous’ is complicated, as the appellation
‘indigenous/Indigenous’ (i.e., with or without a capital ‘I’) can mean
quite different things in different contexts (Lane 2014; McNiven 2016).
In one sense, we are all ‘indigenous,’ at least in particular settings, since
we all have some ties to a particular space within the broader global
community (Corntassel 2003). Consequently, in contexts such as those
found across much of sub-Saharan Africa where the majority of the
population would probably describe themselves if asked as ‘indigenous,’
there may be little call or cause for self-definition as such (Lane 2017; see,
inter alia, Hodgson 2009 for a broader discussion). However, we should
not lose sight of the fact that Africa’s poor, rural and politically non-
dominant peoples are often considered exotic or marginal by their urban
and agricultural neighbors, and as a result commonly experience various
forms of prejudice, discrimination, and a lack of recognition of key
human rights. These communities more closely qualify for designation as
‘Indigenous Peoples’ as understood in terms of the 2007 United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2008).
Botswana’s N/oakhwe populations (known as San in the academic liter-
ature, and as Basarwa in Setswana) are an obvious example—although
the Botswana Government has frequently contested their claim to such
a status, arguing instead that all Batswana are ‘indigenous’ (Saugestad
2011). The different Twa communities of Central Africa are another
obvious group given their current low political and socioeconomic status,
historical and cultural trajectories, and history of discrimination by
neighboring societies and the state (Vandeginste 2014).
Adding to such complexities, with regard to sub-Saharan Africa there
is the further distinction between ‘indigenous’ and ‘autochthonous.’
The latter term is more widely used in Francophone West and Central
Africa, partly because ‘indigene’ (the French near equivalent for ‘indige-
nous’) was widely employed as a term of abuse during the colonial
era, and hence in former French and Belgian colonies on the continent
the appellation ‘indigenous’ may be considered to be insulting rather
than a desirable status (Friedman 2008: 31). Derived from the Greek
word ‘autochthon,’ autochthony means ‘born from the soil’ (Ceuppens
and Geschiere 2005). The term was used initially in West Africa by
French colonial authorities so as to distinguish those of their colonial
subjects who were ‘of the soil’ and those who, despite being more recent
migrants, were the non-European ‘ruling class.’ Hence, like ‘Indigenous,’
the term ‘autochthonous’ generally implies temporal priority of settle-
ment and a degree of political subordination, although unlike the latter
these communities are not necessarily marginal but rather believe that
their resources, culture, or power are threatened by ‘migrants’ (Gausett
et al. 2011: 139).
76 P. J. Lane
While African governments may be resistant to the notion of Indige-

nous Peoples, on the grounds that such categorization has the potential
to foster disharmony between ethnically diverse national populations,
African societies commonly make distinctions within their own oral
histories and traditions between ‘first-comers’ (‘les primo-arrivants’ in
French) and latecomers (‘les nouveaux arrivants’). A particular heritage
challenge that needs to be addressed, therefore, is how do we write
archaeologies and historical narratives that give due recognition to the
copious material, linguistic, and genetic evidence for long histories of
population migration and replacement that do not over romanticize the
social and political consequences of these processes, and which also do
not provide material that could fuel the fires of ethnic conflict? To put
this differently, how should we write about unsettled histories? That
is, histories that are unsettled: firstly, in their initial enactment, being
as much about moving on as about staying in place; secondly, in the
sense that the historical narratives of these settlement histories cannot
be fully resolved; thirdly, that particular histories can be unsettling in
an emotional sense (as research on the legacies of the Transatlantic
and Indian Ocean slave trades has highlighted, e.g., MacGonagle 2006;
Gijanto 2011; Wynne-Jones 2011); and finally, that in their telling these
‘unsettled histories’ also challenge dominant narratives and perceptions
concerning Africa and its peoples’ place in the world.
Sustaining Heritage
The next heritage challenge I want to draw attention to regards liveli-
hoods and how an understanding of cultural heritage can potentially
contribute to improving these and to sustaining African environments.
To start with, it is worth noting that roughly 65% of sub-Saharan
Africans currently rely on agriculture for their livelihood, with the
majority of these as subsistence pastoralists, farmers, or mixed agro-
pastoralists. Agriculture provides ca. 30–40% of the continent’s gross
domestic product, yet few farms are more than a couple of hectares in
extent and most agricultural production is organized at the household
or community level while also being at least partially commercial-

ized (Brzeska et al. 2012). As well as having particular significance
for devising sustainable futures for sub-Saharan Africans (World Bank
2008; Haggblade and Hazell 2010), the centrality of agriculture in most
contemporary African economies also points to a long and intricate
history, or more strictly histories, of food production over the course of at
least seven millennia (Fig. 4). These histories have included independent
domestication of different food crops and possibly also some domestic
animals; the modification and manipulation of ecological niches to better
suit the needs of farming and herding; the nurturing of new crossbreeds,
hybrids, and varieties better adapted to distinctively African ecological
conditions; and the exploitation of a vast array of other plant species
that seemingly have not undergone significant morphological change as
a consequence.3 The adoption of a wide range of ‘exotic’ species from
other parts of the globe—such as banana and taro, both of which were
originally domesticated in SE Asia—has also had a significant role in
Fig. 4 ‘Heritage’ of fields: a domesticated Marakwet landscape of intercropping

and arboriculture as seen from the Cherangani escarpment, Tot, Kenya (Photo
credit: Paul Lane, September 2011)
78 P. J. Lane
shaping food histories and culinary heritage on the continent (on maize,
see, e.g., McCann 2005; on food security, see Logan 2016).
As critically, the consequences of the spread of various African domes-
ticates beyond the geographical confines of the continent to other parts
of the world also need to be considered as part of this wider culinary
heritage story (Carney and Rosomoff 2009). We know, for example, that
millets and sorghums first domesticated in the West African Sahel about
four and a half thousand years ago were already being regularly cultivated
across many parts of the Indian subcontinent within five hundred years,
i.e., by 4000 years ago, possibly even earlier (Fuller and Boivin 2009).
Such evidence also reminds us that Africans have been part of the global
community for millennia, and given what we know about the origins
of our own species, it is probably more correct to say that the global
community has been part of Africa for much longer.
Taking the long view on African agriculture and water management
reminds us also that several different agricultural systems often coexisted
alongside one another, while also leaving space for the continued exis-
tence of hunter-gatherer-fisher populations, thereby generating ethno-
linguistic, economic, and political mosaics that diversified further with
the emergence of urban communities. By the early first millennium CE,
several sophisticated systems of intensive agriculture and irrigation were
in operation in many parts of the continent, and not just along the Nile
(Stump 2013b). Most of the sub-Saharan systems, which developed in
both rain-poor and rain-rich areas, were organized and operated within
non-hierarchical social systems, in marked contrast to the command
economies of Mesopotamia and other so-called great civilizations. We
find similar systems in operation today (Widgren and Sutton 2004).
Understanding how these systems are organized, and their origins,
can bring a fresh perspective to current debates regarding the bene-
fits of the commercialization of water management and water as an
economic good versus decentralized community management and water
as a human right. This knowledge may also have more practical applica-
tion as a source of models for the effective capture of ‘green water.’ This
will become increasingly important in the coming century, particularly
if average global temperatures and their effects on rainfall distribution
continue to rise at their current rate (Rockström and Falkenmark 2015).
It is estimated, for instance, that by 2030, 75 million to 250 million

people in Africa will be living in areas of high water stress. This has
the potential to displace anywhere between 24 million and 700 million
people, across up to 25 countries, with major potential impacts on
health, food supply, poverty levels, security, industrial and economic
development and ecological resilience (Besada and Werner 2015).
Yet, in much the same way that international interest in improving
contemporary agriculture has lagged behind work on other continents,
research on how to use knowledge about the effectiveness of past
systems of environmental management and sustainable food produc-
tion as found on the African continent, remains limited and, integrated
multi-disciplinary studies even more so. The reasons for these large gaps
are numerous. They include the low numbers of professional scien-
tists and researchers in most sub-Saharan African countries; internal and
external research agendas that have directed research attention toward
other topics; and the limited funding available to support research, espe-
cially for local scholars. A further problem is that until very recently
(e.g., Stump 2010; Davies 2012) heritage professionals have also failed
to engage with these kinds of issues—focusing on what the tangible and
intangible evidence can tell us about the past but neglecting to think
about what African cultural heritage can do for the future.
This is unfortunate given the diversity of sources available. Interest-
ingly, the origins of food production in sub-Saharan Africa followed a
different trajectory to that of most other regions with the adoption of
domestic animals typically preceding the adoption of food crops (Lane
2015a). Moreover, the histories of food production and autochthonous
systems of water management on the continent offer numerous oppor-
tunities for novel theoretical insights into a range of topics: the creation
and maintenance of ethnic mosaics across moving and stable frontiers;
the drivers of agricultural intensification, and the ecological impacts of
the adoption of farming; the reconstruction of ideological structures
and patterns of descent; propositions concerning ‘landscape domestica-
tion’; and the role of indigenous knowledge in planning for sustainable
and resilient futures. Key to facilitating these kinds of contributions
both substantively and theoretically will be the development of more
sophisticated approaches to the study of human-nature interactions.
80 P. J. Lane
Heritage Natures
African ecosystems have been shaped over millennia by diverse interac-
tions between changing climatic conditions, biophysical variables (such
as soil, vegetation, and fauna), and ever-increasing human interven-
tions. These ‘heritage natures’ in which humans and nature have been
intimately entangled for centuries, perhaps even millennia, both co-
producing the other, are now under pressure from rapid population
growth and the associated resource needs this has created. Also, it is antic-
ipated that likely climatic and atmospheric change will have significant
consequences for human-ecosystem relationships thereby posing new
challenges for their management and sustainable development (Midgley
and Bond 2015). Governance, land tenure, and economic conditions
may also change, further complicating the task of ecosystem manage-
ment. Recent research has suggested that understandings of past human-
ecosystem-environmental interactions and how these evolved can be of
central importance to planning and designing more resilient societies and
sustainable food production systems (Marchant and Lane 2014). Crit-
ically, the long history and extent of such interactions as revealed by
these studies means that few places, if any, in Africa can be thought of as
truly ‘pristine’. Yet all too often, large tracts of African landscapes, espe-
cially those now set aside for wildlife conservation, have been presented
in precisely these terms (Neumann 1998). Because many of these land-
scapes have been associated historically with groups that now self-identify
as Indigenous Peoples, this has often resulted in their historic portrayal
in museums and other interpretive media in largely ahistorical terms and
as being part of nature and the wilderness, rather than as cultured human
beings (Davison 2001).
While such negative stereotyping should rightly be criticized, it is
instructive to note that in some parts of the continent self-identifying
Indigenous Peoples are now positioning themselves as the rightful and
original custodians of nature conservation areas, and many international
conservation bodies are responding to such claims (Colchester 2003;
Robinson 2011). These efforts can certainly be applauded on a number
of fronts, not least for empowering local communities and fostering
greater participation in wildlife conservation efforts and even bringing
genuine economic benefits. However, we must also be cautious about

some of these claims and not be too easily swayed by the rhetoric of
sustainability (Lane 2015b). To put this differently, much more research
needs to be directed at establishing the temporal depth of particular
components of indigenous knowledge (Stump 2010), and especially
those that are currently being proposed as providing solutions to current
environmental crises.
One of the most effective ways to begin to address this challenge is
through the development of historical ecology in a manner that compli-
cates the notion of human environmental impacts by acknowledging the
possibility that disturbance caused by human activities has often played a
key role, as in Amazonia (e.g., Erickson 2008; Balée 2013) in enhancing
the diversity and complexity of specific ecosystems. Most African ecosys-
tems thus need to be understood as ‘constructed’ or ‘domesticated’
landscapes in which nature is as much part of the human sphere as
humans are of nature. Examples can be found across the continent, from
the West African rainforest (Fraser et al. 2015) to the grazing lawns of
East African semiarid savannah landscapes (Lane 2016). The latter have
diverse origins and complex histories (Petek 2015). Thus, it is known
that various natural processes including fires, long-term droughts, ungu-
late densities and grazing regimes, and the actions of large keystone
species such as elephants and rhinos can all contribute to the creation
of glades and the maintenance of grazing lawns (Boles and Lane 2016).
Ecological research has also confirmed that in some landscapes glades
mark the location of abandoned pastoralist settlements where livestock is
consistently penned overnight as a result of a series of linked relations of
ecological mutualism (Boles and Lane 2016; Marshall et al. 2018). Once
established, a series of feedback mechanisms can come into play that
help maintain glades within the landscape by restricting tree recruitment,
and in so doing set in train additional ecological processes that typically
enhance localized biodiversity at all trophic levels. Oral histories have
shown that these glades can remain as biodiversity hotspots for upwards
of a hundred years. Ongoing archaeological research suggests that some
may even remain within the landscape for considerably longer, and it
is possible that some glades created by intensive human activity have
sustained high levels of biodiversity for almost 600 years (see Lane 2016),
82 P. J. Lane
and in some instances potentially for several thousand years (Marshall

et al. 2018).
Unlike sacred groves, which are found widely distributed across
the African continent and are acknowledged as biodiversity ‘hotspots’
derived from their active management as important sociocultural and
religious spaces (Sheridan and Nyamweru 2008), glades are largely the
result of unintended consequences of pastoralist settlement dynamics.
Nonetheless, this particular example illustrates a broader point that
knowledge about the past is not simply a means of satisfying our
‘backward-looking curiosity’ but can also play a fundamental role in
helping understand the present (Lane 2009) and potentially also in
planning a sustainable future (Ekblom 2015; Lindholm 2015).
Urbanizing Heritage
While it is important to consider rural contexts and the value of African
farming and herding heritage, more of Africa’s population now live in
urban settings. Accordingly, the legacies of urbanism, the transforma-
tions in urban dwelling, how these relate to shifting concepts of urbanity,
and the sustainability of Africa’s towns and cities, are all issues that
require critical consideration. As Paul Sinclair and colleagues (2016: 2)
have recently highlighted, globally there have been massive losses ‘of
social-ecological memory among present-day urban residents about how
to produce food and procure water for domestic consumption,’ with
a consequent erosion of urban ‘resilience and the diversity of options
needed for urban systems to accommodate perturbations and reorganise
food systems.’ Also, the continuing growth of cities, and the stimulus
this will give to the extraction industries, will inevitably pose increased
pressures on heritage resources management. If even only a tiny propor-
tion of those that are likely to be threaten with destruction are to be
preserved—whether on record or physically—this will require far more
efficient systems of archaeological impact assessment and mitigation than
currently exist, and considerably more robust planning systems (Lane
2011). I am not convinced that the heritage professions as whole in
Africa have fully recognized the scale of urban expansion that is likely to
occur over the next half century, so it is worth considering some of the
commonly cited estimates—although I acknowledge these predictions
always need to be used cautiously.
Between 1950 and 2000, the percentage of urban dwellers in Africa
grew from 14.7% of the total population to 36.2% (United Nations
Development Programme 2004), and by 2014, it had reached 40%
(roughly 455.3 million) (United Nations 2014: 7, 20). The continent’s
total population is expected to rise by 60 percent by 2050, with eastern,
western, and Central Africa predicted to experience particularly rapid
rises. During this same period, the urban population may triple to 1.23
billion (UN-HABITAT 2010), with some of the fastest growth in urban
populations likely to occur in the next 15–20 years. Historical trends
are also worth reflecting on as they can provide us with some sense of
the possible consequences for heritage resources as more land is built on,
urban infrastructure is expanded, and the extraction industries supplying
raw materials grow to meet escalating demand.
One area for which good statistical data are available is West Africa
(see Agence Française de Développement 2011), where between 1950
and 2000, the urban population grew from 4.6 million to 74.6 million,
and the rate of urbanization across the region as a whole rose from 7.5%
p.a. in 1950 to 31% p.a. in 2000. Over the same period, the expansion
of urbanized surfaces grew at an average annual rate of 5.1% and the
average distance between urban areas was reduced by a factor of three,
from 111 km to just 33 km. By 2000, the total built area was calculated
as covering 14,450 sq. km (Denis and Moriconi-Ebrard, n.d.). There
was also an increase in the total number of ‘urban’ agglomerations (from
125 to 1500), characterized by a proliferation of secondary settlements
and increases in the density of settlement of already urbanized spaces.
Nearly all of this expansion was left unmonitored by heritage authorities
partly because so much of it was driven by informal development. But,
even where urban expansion was planned, the lack of routine cultural
heritage impact assessments means that virtually nothing is known about
how many heritage sites in the region were destroyed or damaged by
associated construction and extraction activities over this time period.
Although the situation has improved in many countries, both in West
Africa and elsewhere on the continent (Arazi and Thiaw 2013), large
84 P. J. Lane
tracts of land and the heritage resources they contain are still likely
to be threatened by the predicted expansion of urban settlements and
infrastructure in coming decades.
The global expansion of urban populations is also having direct conse-
quences across Africa as Asian and Arab nations with rapidly growing
urban populations are increasingly acquiring large tracts of land across
the continent for intensive agriculture, often accompanied by large scale
irrigation projects. Recent assessments of the distribution of such land
acquisitions, which are often obtained through back hand deals with
local elites and government officials, indicate that somewhere around
51–63 million hectares across Africa had been appropriated, or were in
the course of being acquired, by 2009 (Friis and Reenberg 2010). The
precise scale of ‘land grabbing’ on the continent is unknown, however,
and estimates are regularly contested because of the way in which data
have been compiled (Baglioni and Gibbon 2013; Edelman et al. 2013).
Even so, it is clear that the Gulf States, China, India, and South Korea
are among the major players in this process, although major Western
companies are also purchasing large tracts. Multiple drivers are involved;
these include the growth in demand for biofuels, wildlife conservation
initiatives, and the fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis—which
triggered a significant rise in investment in land by multi-nationals
and African entrepreneurs. These developments are eroding local food
production systems, dispossessing and impoverishing local communi-
ties and impacting biodiversity, with little evidence for genuine financial
benefits accruing to either regional or national economies (Fairhead et al.
2012 Woodhouse 2012 Messerli et al. 2014). Furthermore, because of
the manner in which the land is acquired and then converted to farmland
and the geopolitical motivations behind many such acquisitions (Verho-
even 2011; Scheidel and Sorman 2012), this upsurge in external demand
for large tracts of land is having a major impact on both tangible,
especially archaeological, and intangible cultural heritage in these areas.
As events in the Sudan in reaction to dam building (Hafsaas-Tsakos
2011; Kleinitz and Näser 2013) and tensions surrounding other mega-
developments indicate (e.g., Kankpeyeng et al. 2009; Apoh and Gavua
2016), local communities are becoming increasingly hostile to these
kinds of acquisitions and it seems likely that violent confrontations over
land and the cultural heritage it supports may thus become increas-
ingly common across Africa in the near future. Certainly, there has
been continuing protest in the Sudan, especially from Nubian commu-
nities, over plans for yet more dams and land appropriation (Enough
Team 2016). Related to these developments, there are worrying signs
that the greater engagement of foreign nationals in commercial farming,
construction, and extraction projects is stimulating the looting of sites,
although other drivers—including the promotion of tourism—also need
to be considered (Keenan 2005; Mayor et al. 2015).
All is not necessarily bad, however, and as Shadreck Chirikure (2015)
has pointed out, some mining and other companies have been very
accommodating of the concerns raised by archaeologists and other
heritage professionals. Working with rather than against commercial
interests and with major development projects, as demonstrated in
different ways by recent projects in Cameroon (MacEachern 2010)
and Lesotho (Arthur et al. 2011), although certainly not without chal-
lenges—including ethical ones (King and Arthur 2014)—these models
can offer a more promising way forward. There can even be some
surprising positive consequences—especially when it comes to using
mitigation projects as a means to also build and reinforce local capac-
ities and community engagement, even if the end results are not always
ideal.
Hybrid Heritages
Returning to the issue of modernity introduced above, much more effort
needs to be directed toward transforming heritage-oriented disciplines,
such as archaeology and museology, so as to avoid the constant reproduc-
tion of narrow dualisms of modernity that cast individuals and societies
as necessarily being either traditional or modern, and instead embrace
more pluralistic concepts. More specifically, recognizing that we need to
‘understand modernity from Africa’ (Geschiere et al. 2008: 4), I suggest
that heritage work on the continent would benefit from the development
of multi-sited approaches.
86 P. J. Lane
Geschiere and colleagues (2008) draw particular attention to the

entangled relations that emerged throughout the Atlantic world
following the expansions of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Numerous
studies have been undertaken both in Africa and beyond its shores on
different forms of commemoration, memorialization, and other heritage
work associated with the legacies of this trade (e.g., Kowaleski-Wallace
2006; Smith et al. 2011; Dresser and Hann 2013; Araujo 2014).4
However, few if any of these studies have sought to compare the ways in
which tangible and intangible heritage with Transatlantic slavery associa-
tions have been mobilized by the different descendant communities and
nation-states that were linked to one another during the trade, or how
their respective engagements in the trade (whether enforced or willing)
shaped each other’s heritage.5
Other commodity (e.g., cocoa, palm oil, and ivory) chains that arose
along with slave trading, or as a direct consequence of efforts to abolish
the trade in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, helped fuel industri-
alization in North America and Europe. These similarly lend themselves
to multi-sited analyses. By this I mean parallel studies of and engage-
ment with heritage at multiple sites at different points along the value
chains that connected different parts of Africa with places and people
outside the continent. Thus, for example, a study of the heritage land-
scapes of the nineteenth-century trade in eastern African elephant ivory
would not just be focused on the tangible and intangible heritage of this
trade found in eastern Africa, but would engage also with their associ-
ated traces elsewhere, such as Sheffield (Symonds et al. 2006; Unwin
2014) in the UK and Ivoryton CT (Malcarne et al. 2003; Kelly 2014)
in the USA—both places where the working of ivory had consequences
for their historical trajectories (Fig. 5). It would also need to consider
the localities in India, Europe, and North America where products, such
as beads, cotton cloth, and brass wire, were produced for exchange with
ivory, and other ‘sites’ associated with the consumption of ivory. Even
in eastern Africa, given the multiplicity of actors and agents involved in
the trade, from hunters and caravan porters to the financiers, merchants,
and ivory buyers, multi-sited research is needed. To be effective, precisely
because regional histories have been globally entangled for millennia,
Fig. 5 Part of Africa’s heritage? Former factory where ivory from East Africa
was cut and processed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Ivoryton, Connecticut, USA (Photo credit: Paul Lane, May 2010)
these multi-sited studies must explore the shifting influences and contri-
butions of different cultures and societies to the creation of ‘heritage,’
acknowledging the power it has to shape lives and to change cultural
registers many miles away (e.g., De Jong and Quax 2009).
At present, much research on Africa’s diverse heritages still has a
tendency to search for ‘the authentic/traditional/original’ in Africa’s pasts,
to the neglect of research documenting the antiquity of African cultural
hybridity and its legacies both on the continent and elsewhere in the
world. Without this, we will always be struggling to contest the stereo-
typical views of Africa as a continent of cultural stasis and as a remnant
88 P. J. Lane
of a pre-modern world (Leissle 2012), rather than as having been a

key player in the making of the modern world and all its attendant
consequences.
Conclusion—Broadening Heritage
Constituencies
Heritage, as Laurajane Smith (2009: 34) notes, ‘is a cultural process or
performance, concerned ultimately not with the management of things,
but with the management and regulation of social value and cultural
meanings.’ But precisely because heritage is about social values and
cultural meanings, it is also about making decisions over what to main-
tain and sustain. Such values, of course, are always transient, variable, and
mutable. Hence, what we today identify as something worth sustaining
may not correspond either with what people in the past identified as
such, or what future generations will find to be significant. As heritage
managers, our ethical responsibilities to protect and conserve for the
future are frequently challenged also by the demands and interests of
the present which may not align especially closely with the values our
professions and disciplinary affiliations assign to different kinds of traces
from the past. As is increasingly recognized, decisions about what to
conserve and the degree to which such decisions are ultimately real-
ized depend in part on the characteristics of the heritage regime (Bendix
et al. 2012) in which that decision-making process is embedded, and
the relative authoritative and allocative power of those involved. When
it comes to tangible remains there is always a degree of ‘monumental
ambivalence’ (Breglia 2006), which is given its most extreme expres-
sion through the kind of iconoclasm seen in recent years in the Middle
East and northern Africa (e.g., Abraham 2012; O’Dell 2013). Calls for
the criminalization of such activities (e.g., Martinez 2015), commonly
appeal to a particular universalizing normative ethos that emphasizes the
value of heritage as a source of identity and pride, a means of knowing
the past, and as symbols of human accomplishments and ingenuity, while
overlooking the political economy of heritage and its power not just as a
means of allaying anxieties over modernity, but also as a form of future-

making (Zetterstrom-Sharp 2015). And therein, perhaps, lies the biggest
challenge facing African heritage professionals over the coming decades.
Namely, how to best enable the youth of Africa to take control of their
cultural heritage in a manner that serves their aspirations for a better
future while also allowing space for the voices of the dead to be heard
and their actions remembered.
Policy Suggestions
1. The promotion of sustainable development and the creation of
resilient societies should be grounded in a detailed understanding
of past human-environment relations and their consequences, both
intended and otherwise, as they have developed over the course of
centuries and even millennia.
2. The protection and management of heritage should be given greater
importance and more respect in the planning and development
processes, and be re-designed so as to better enable communities in
their efforts to protect and manage the cultural heritage they value
and attach significance to, without undermining the responsibilities
of the state to cultural heritage more generally.
3. The false binary between cultural heritage and natural heritage, and
the different management regimes associated with these, need to be
abandoned, and new approaches to the protection, management and
celebration of biocultural heritage developed in consultation with all
relevant stakeholders, including local communities.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank organizers and sponsors of the 2015

African Heritage Challenges Conference, and especially Britt Baillie, Marie
Louise Sørensen, and Leanne Philpot for their invitation to present a keynote
paper, and for handling all the travel plans and logistics. My thanks too, to
Britt and Marie Louise for their helpful editorial comments and patience while
I was revising various drafts. Thanks are also due to the Conference partici-
pants for their comments and feedback on my paper, especially John Giblin and
90 P. J. Lane
Rachel King. I take full responsibility for all remaining errors and expressions
of opinion.
Notes
1. The second part of my title is a reference to Wole Soyinka’s 1963 play A
Dance of the Forests. The play explores the unfolding of events at a ‘gathering
of the tribes’ festivity where the living having asked their gods to invite some
illustrious ancestors, have to deal with the demands and critical scrutiny of
‘two spirits of the restless dead’ rather than the cultural heroes they expected.
This seems like a fitting metaphor for the task of contemporary heritage
management, both in Africa and elsewhere.
2. As for instance has happened in South Africa following the launch of the
#RhodesMustFall movement in March 2015 (Oxlund 2016; Schmahmann
2016) and, for quite different reasons in Timbuktu between 2012 and 2013
(Abraham 2012; O’Dell 2013).
3. In other words, the historically informed reading of material traces.
4. For instance, over 60 species of wild grasses have been recorded as being
used either as staples or as famine foods (National Research Council 2006,
2008).
5. There is a large body of literature on this topic; these cited works are
intended to be simply indicative of some of the themes now being studied.
6. One attempt to do precisely that, by the Museum of London Docklands in
2007 as part of the Bicentenary events to mark the passage of the British Act
of Parliament to abolish the slave trade in 1807, unfortunately never came
to fruition (Leanne Munro, pers. comm. 22 July 2016, see also UNESCO
2007).
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Heritage and/or Development—Which
Way for Africa?
Webber Ndoro
Introduction to African Heritages

In his book, Triple Heritage (1986), Ali Mazrui reminds us of the key
cultural identities of Africa which derive from indigenous African culture
and traditions, from the influence of Islam, and from the influence of
the West through colonialism and Christianity. Africa is not a cultur-
ally homogeneous continent and neither does it represent a common
history, traditions, and customs. Far from the romantic image of Africa as
a continent with a uniform and common ancestry, language, and orien-
tation, the real Africa presents a complex tapestry of cultures and social
influences that have variously shaped norms of behavior and community
identities across its vast landscape. These varying historical trajectories
and varied geographies also have their own influences on cultural and
other behaviors, and this results not in the creation of an African culture,
custom, or tradition, but a variety of African cultures, traditions, and
W. Ndoro (B)
University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_4
104 W. Ndoro
customs. The apparent indifference to this reality presents a real chal-

lenge to post-colonial heritage practices, which are supposed to promote
democracy, human rights, and equal access and contribute to the ideals
of the development of the African continent as espoused by the United
Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030 (SDG 2015) and the
African Union Agenda 2063.
Africa and the Development Agenda

Africa as a developing continent is faced with challenges in achieving
sustainable development, while maintaining its social and cultural fabric
as well as ensuring that heritage places such as World Heritage Sites are
preserved. At times, the conservation of heritage and the improvement of
livelihoods are perceived as opposite sides of a coin. Issues relating to the
incompatibility of resource utilization and conservation have dominated
the conservation debates on the continent. Recently, the African Union,
through its development blueprint Agenda 2063 ‘the Africa we want,’
has called upon heritage to contribute to a better and more prosperous
Africa. Agenda 2063 is a long-term policy document on sustainable
development with implications for the protection and promotion of both
cultural heritage and natural heritage in Africa. It envisions an integrated
prosperous and peaceful Africa driven by its citizenry. The central role
envisaged for cultural heritage in the future development of the conti-
nent is articulated in Aspiration 5, which seeks ‘An Africa with a strong
cultural identity, common heritage, values and ethics.’ However, the aspi-
rations of Agenda 2063 are supposed to unleash economic development
which will in turn have considerable impact on the continent’s heritage
(Blake 2014). Agenda 2063 outlines the envisioned development projects
and where they are likely to occur but does not detail their impacts on the
heritage landscape. The key flagship programs to drive the development
agenda on the continent are identified as:
a. An Integrated High-Speed Train Network;

b. An African Virtual and E-University;
c. An African Commodity Strategy;
d. An Annual African Forum;

e. A Continental Free Trade Area;
f. An African Passport and Free Movement of People;
g. The Grand Inga Dam Project;
h. A Pan African E-Network;
i. Silencing the Guns;
j. African Outer Space Strategy.
At the national level, many countries have also made economic trans-
formation a key focus of their development agendas. For example, the
Ethiopian government has a Growth and Transformation Plan aimed
at increasing agricultural and industrial growth. Cote d’Ivoire has an
Economic Emergence Strategy aimed at making it an industrial economy
by 2020. Similarly, Uganda intends to accelerate its socioeconomic trans-
formation through Vision 2040 and Lesotho’s Vision 2020 gives pride
of place to industrial development. Countries such as Egypt, Kenya,
Rwanda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, among others, have also devel-
opment plans and strategies to transform their economies (UNCTAD
2014). These plans call for the exploitation of resources and infras-
tructural construction on phenomenal scales. In 2009, for example, the
Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa began work on the
North-South Corridor Project which is a series of roadways and railways
spanning more than 6000 miles across seven countries. Projects at this
scale will have impacts on heritage and its protection.
Energy Projects
One of the identified key drivers for development in Agenda 2063, is

energy. Sub-Saharan Africa is starved of electricity. The region’s power
sector is significantly underdeveloped, in terms of energy access, installed
capacity, or overall consumption. The fact that sub-Saharan Africa’s
residential and industrial sectors suffer electricity shortages means the
countries struggle to sustain GDP growth (McKinsey & Company
2015). Indeed, fulfilling the economic and social promise of the region,
and Africa, in general, depends on the development of energy sources.
106 W. Ndoro
Sub-Saharan Africa’s situation is the world’s worst. It has 13% of the

world’s population, but 48% of the share of the global population
without access to electricity (Ibid.: 6). Only 24% of sub-Saharan Africans
have access to electricity and the energy generation capacity of Africa
(excluding South Africa) is only 28 gigawatts, equal to that of Argentina
alone and about 5% the consumption of the United States (Avila et al.
2017: 16). The inadequacy of electricity supply is a fact of life in nearly
every sub-Saharan country. Furthermore, in most countries, electricity
is provided by diesel generators, whose costs are exorbitant. This makes
many Africa-based industries and manufacturing sectors uncompetitive
and brings down annual GDP growth (McKinsey & Company 2015).
This, in turn, means that the construction of dams and resource exploita-
tion of minerals such as coal to ensure energy for development is a
priority in many African countries. While the harnessing of green energy
sources is an alternative option as indicated in Agenda 2063, the costs
currently are very high and the process very slow, hence the overreliance
on hydro and thermal power (Karekezi and Kithyoma 2003).
The construction of large dams prior to the 1960s was very signif-
icant globally and celebrated in countries such as the United States,
Australia, Canada, the former Soviet Union, Japan, as well as in Western
Europe. Institutions like the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of
Engineers of the United States became world famous for their expertise
in constructing and managing large dams to promote economic develop-
ment and sustain human welfare. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
in the United States was, for example, regarded with awe by the rest of
the world for a considerable period (Biswas and Tortajada 2001). The
TVA was one of the most famous and successful projects begun by the
federal government during the Great Depression. It led to the widescale
provision of energy and irrigation and became a recreational success. It
is one of the major projects accredited with the reindustrialization of the
United States after the Depression. Thus, the building of dams, because
it provides a local non-extractive source of energy, has frequently been
seen as a catalyst for economic development—hence the prioritization of
the Grand Inga Dam within Agenda 2063. Countries with low electrifi-
cation rates have lower GDPs per capita, and the logic is that increased
energy leads to improvements in health care, education, life expectancy,

and job opportunities.
The Grand Inga Dam is one of the flagship projects of Agenda 2063.
It is seen as the key to unlocking Africa’s energy requirements and hence
its development. The Grand Inga Dam, actually a series of dams that
are proposed for the lower Congo River in the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC), will be the world’s largest hydropower scheme. The
Grand Inga Dam will become the largest energy-generating body in the
world. Its total development cost is an estimated $100 billion. Devel-
opers expect to finish the project by 2025. The dam is part of a greater
vision by the international economic community to develop a power
grid across Africa that will spur the continent’s industrial, economic, and
sustainable development. Grand Inga could produce up to 40,000 MW
of electricity, over twice the power generation of the Three Gorges Dam
in China and Itaipu Dam in Brazil and Paraguay. Fully operational,
the Inga Dam will provide more than a third of the total electricity
currently produced in Africa (McKinsey & Company 2015). However,
it should be noted that dams at this scale, like the Three Gorges, have
had serious environmental and heritage impacts, which are irreversible.
Of all the flagship projects, the greatest hope for the future of Africa
is placed on the Grand Inga Dam. The project is already being touted
as a way to ‘light Africa.’ Grand Inga is listed as a priority project of
the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), the New Part-
nership for African Development (NEPAD), South African Power Pool
(SAPP), and the World Energy Council. Although the project has been
discussed for the past decade, no significant impact assessment on the
heritage that will be affected has been done, despite the fact that the
DRC itself has five natural World Heritage Sites which could be affected.
Some of the Agenda 2063 flagship programs will inevitably impact on
heritage resources. It can be argued that the failure of heritage conserva-
tion to be on the agenda of decision makers has been the major heritage
problem on the continent. It appears that when issues pertaining to the
sustainable development of the continent are discussed, heritage is rarely
presented as an enabling factor for the ‘Africa we want.’ At the same
time, heritage practitioners tend not to engage with the decision makers
108 W. Ndoro
at the economic or political levels. Rarely does one find heritage profes-
sionals and practitioners participating in the formulation stages of some
of the African Union or regional organizations’ (SADC, ECOWAS, etc.)
debates on the development agenda.
Heritage and Development

The concept of sustainable development is popularly more associated
with the protection of natural rather than cultural heritage. However,
it is important, particularly on the African continent, to include cultural
heritage in all sustainable development projects. The African continent
is the cradle of humankind and therefore carries the imprint of human
interactions with nature over millennia. Africa’s nature: the landforms,
the fauna, and flora are inextricably entwined with its culture. Sacred
forests, mountains, pools, trees, and animals have populated the African
landscapes for centuries. The divide between nature and culture on the
continent is not very clear, and often not very helpful. Many of the
‘natural’ landscapes have been shaped by cultural interactions. The issue
of sustainable development is therefore as much about ‘culture’ as it is
about ‘nature.’
Sustainable development is relevant to people’s livelihoods which is
the sphere in which cultural heritage is performed (Selfslagh 2002).
Poverty, unemployment, and inequality indicate the lack of economic
development in Africa. Here, the majority of people live below the
poverty line (Beegle et al. 2016). Often, capital and employment oppor-
tunities are scarce, effectively leaving communities with few options
to meet their development needs. Indigenous knowledge, a form of
heritage, has emerged as one of the most potentially powerful engines
for economic development (Galla 2012). Heritage provides opportuni-
ties for job creation, infrastructure development, and education. One of
the most common ways of exploiting heritage resources is through the
promotion of heritage-based tourism.
Evidence from various countries in the world, including Africa,
demonstrates that World Heritage status of places serves as a catalyst, not
only for conservation, partnerships, social cohesion, skills development,
and education, but also for job creation, infrastructure development,

and foreign direct investment, which all contribute to an increase in
GDP (Ibid.). The mere presence of internationally designated cultural or
natural heritage places is likely to affect long-term GDP growth (Arezki
et al. 2009). Tourism at heritage places can trigger growth in several ways
other than through the direct revenue gained from visitor receipts. The
foreign direct investment associated with tourism can bring managerial
skills and technology with potential downstream benefits to other sectors.
Policies designed to foster tourism, by improving security, stability, and
openness, can also enhance growth in other sectors. Cultural and natural
heritage also supplies the ‘raw material’ and ‘backdrop’ for the creative
entertainment industries, featuring in film, fashion, advertising, televi-
sion, and video games. However, the reality on the African continent
is that rarely do the benefits of tourism benefit the local communities
(Ndoro 2015).
Heritage places can be seen as important resources that have the poten-
tial to drive socioeconomic development, provided that the ‘right mix’
is attained. Although World Heritage inscription is generally consid-
ered to act as a catalyst for economic development, there are many
issues in Africa which create obstacles to sustainable development and
heritage conservation. These include actions by local communities and
local government, contestation over ownership and access rights, and the
forced displacement of local populations from sites as governments seek
to comply with UNESCO-imposed management systems (Ndoro 2015;
Hampton 2005).
The money visitors spend at World Heritage Sites on admission fees,
souvenirs, transport, food, and accommodation represents a substantial
contribution to the global economy, and heritage sites employ millions
of people directly and indirectly (Timothy and Boyd 2003). However,
although some heritage sites have generated forms of economic develop-
ment, it is generally perceived in Africa that most of the benefits do not
trickle down to local communities. In this regard, it is telling that many
of Africa’s famous heritage sites are surrounded by a sea of poverty. Here,
the benefit of inscription as a World Heritage Site and the knock-on
effects generated by global tourism seem to be limited, as local communi-
ties are yet to see significant improvements in their lives and livelihoods.
110 W. Ndoro
The lack of meaningful economic benefits to the local communities

from heritage resources in many ways militates against serious consid-
eration of heritage issues by many governments in Africa. Like in many
parts of the world, unless heritage management has a direct relevance to
communities, communities find ways of coping without it. Despite these
limitations, the role of heritage in acting as a catalyst to development
has been acknowledged in other continents. Heritage can boost the local
and national economy and create jobs by attracting tourists and invest-
ment, and providing leisure, recreation, and educational facilities (Tweed
and Sutherland 2007; Nijkamp and Riganti 2008). The construction and
service industries can benefit from the value added by heritage resources,
and it can stimulate infrastructural development and create jobs. There-
fore, ‘cultural heritage must be understood as part of the larger sphere of
socio-cultural processes’ (Avrami et al. 2000: 7) and managed in such a
way as to ‘be able to generate economic benefits and contribute to growth
and development of the continent.’
Sustainable Development and Heritage Issues

The practices of heritage management and conservation are geared
toward safeguarding and ensuring that assets deemed to be of heritage
significance are not damaged or lost by any means (Logan and Reeves
2009). The purpose of protection is to ensure that the authenticity,
the integrity, the localness, and the uniqueness of heritage places
in the face of modern infrastructural development are maintained
(Winter and Daly 2012). The idea that developments must ensure
the safeguarding of the common heritage of mankind is what trig-
gered the international cooperation which lead to the campaign to
save the Nubian monuments on the Nile River during the construc-
tion of the Aswan Dam in the 1960s (Ndoro and Wijesuriya 2015).
The construction of this dam aimed to provide energy and irriga-
tion for the communities along the river. The irony of the matter
was that it was the availability of water along the Nile which itself
had promoted the development of the ancient monuments, some of
which were used to ensure adequate water for irrigation. However, this
very noble 1960s dam project threatened to flood the temples of Abu
Simbel and other ancient monuments along the Nile Valley. UNESCO,
together with the governments of Egypt and Sudan, appealed to the
international community for assistance and cooperation to rescue the
heritage that would be destroyed.
Efforts were made to document, inventory, and rescue some of the
monuments under threat. Similar international efforts were also seen in
the ‘rescues’ and restorations of archaeological remains at Mohenjo-Daro
in Pakistan, the Borobudur temple in Indonesia (Donnacie 2010), and
the Cultural Triangle in Sri Lanka. However, these campaigns signaled
the beginning of an uneasy relationship between heritage protection
and what was considered to be the needs of development (Ndoro and
Wijesuriya 2015). In Africa, it can also be argued that the construction
of the Aswan Dam apart from galvanizing the international community
to save the Nubian monuments also contributed to the development of
modern Egypt (Hassan 2007). It was the construction of the Aswan Dam
itself which propelled the modernization of Egypt though its provision
of secure and low-cost energy and water.
International organizations such as UNESCO, IUCN, ICCROM,
and ICOMOS have become heritage champions charged with dissem-
inating information to help protect the fragile and irreplaceable heritage
of the world in the face of threats by development on the continent.
These organizations often call for large-scale development projects to
be stopped, particularly when they are in the vicinity of internation-
ally recognized heritage sites and landscapes. For example, during 2017,
UNESCO called for the Republic of Tanzania to halt the construction of
the Stiegler’s Gorge Dam in the Selous Game Park World Heritage Site.
The Ethiopian government’s proposal to construct a large dam on
the Omo River opened debates on economic development which have
at times been conflated with issues of human rights and governance
(Abbink 2012). Ethiopia’s massive and ambitious investment in dams is
regarded by the state as a vital step toward ensuring domestic economic
growth, becoming energy-independent and even establishing itself as an
exporter of hydropower (Ibid.).
Environmentalists indicate that the construction of the dam will affect
the livelihoods of many people downstream (in Ethiopia) because of the
cessation of seasonal floods and the recession of the water upon which
112 W. Ndoro
they are dependant (Turton 2010). A similar number of people in Kenya

will also be affected, due to the expected drying out of Lake Turkana
and its delta (Avery 2010). The Lower Omo Valley and Lake Turkana
(a unique desert lake with natural and economic value) are UNESCO
World Heritage Sites. The Valley is also home to hominid finds and
evidence of ancient habitation. UNESCO has requested a postpone-
ment of the construction of the Gibe III Dam until all negative impacts
of the development have been independently investigated and evaluated
(UNESCO 2014). UNESCO ignored the impact assessment carried out
by the Ethiopian consultants as they suspected that its findings were
in part dictated by the Ethiopian authorities. It is important to point
out that the ground-breaking ceremony signaling the construction of the
Dam was attended by the Kenyan President indicating his government’s
approval of the dam in 2011. The two governments also signed a memo-
randum of understanding on the Dam’s construction. This development
clearly indicates that the two governments did not take into considera-
tion heritage issues (which UNESCO later raised) when deciding on the
design and construction of the dam. It is equally true that heritage prac-
titioners were not engaged in the design of the countries’ development
projects.
In the case of Ethiopia, the proposed dams threaten the ecosystems
not only of that country, but also of neighboring Kenya (UNESCO
2014). But it can be argued that the irrigation and electricity that these
environmentally and culturally destructive projects facilitate simultane-
ously contribute to addressing some of the issues articulated in the UN’s
Sustainable Development Goals (2015) and the AU Agenda 2063—
specifically poverty reduction and economic sustainability. China faced
a similar situation regarding the Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest
hydroelectric projects in the world to date (Ndoro and Wijesuriya 2015).
With China’s growing energy needs, it has been argued that this project
will enable the country to move away from its dependence on coal
(Qiang 2003). Hirsch and Warren (2002) have also pointed out the
positive environmental effects of the dams in terms of non-fossil fuel
energy production and carbon emission reduction. Many countries are
thus faced with the contradictory needs of conserving their heritage
and strengthening their infrastructure and economic development, as
is exemplified by the proposals for dam construction along the Three

Parallel Rivers in Yunnan, China, and the Farakka Dam on the Ganges
River in India.
Resource Exploitation in Africa

Africa is well known for its rich diversity of natural and cultural heritage
which attracts many tourists to the continent; it also has large quan-
tity of mineral resources. Africa’s minerals attract investment from all
over the world. Chinese investment in African mining quadrupled from
2000 to 2009, from US$25.7 billion to US$103.4 billion per year
(Janneh and Ping 2011). While Chinese investment is increasing, so
too is investment from other parts of the world including Australia and
Canada (Janneh and Ping 2011). More than 230 Australian mining
companies are involved in over 600 projects in mining exploration,
extraction, and processing across the continent (Broadman 2007). This
mineral exploration often requires, and results in, major infrastruc-
tural projects, including roads and railways as well as shipping ports
(to facilitate export), and dams (to meet operational energy and water
requirements). The expansion of roads, railways, and ports is also seen
as being key to the rapid economic development of the African conti-
nent (Agenda 2063) as indicated by the proposed Tripartite North-South
road network which is supposed to connect Eastern and Southern Africa
(Ernest and Young 2012). In 2009, the Tripartite Regional Economic
Communities which consist of the Common Market for Eastern and
Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC) and
the Southern African Development Community (SADC) (RECs) the
Tripartite launched a pilot transport corridor program, the North-South
Corridor targeting the construction of 10,647 km of road (8746.3 km
excluding South Africa). These developments will transform the spatial
patterns of rural and urban development on the subcontinent.
Africa hosts about 30% of the planet’s mineral reserves, including 40%
of gold, 60% cobalt, and 90% of the world’s platinum group minerals
(PGMs) reserves (Taylor et al. 2009; Edwards et al. 2013), which has
led to the development of major extractive industry-based economies,
114 W. Ndoro
for example, in South Africa, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, and the Demo-
cratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The saleable minerals and metals
include gold, platinum group elements (PGEs), diamonds, uranium,
manganese, chromium, nickel, bauxite, and cobalt. In most African
countries, the majority of direct foreign investment has been directed to
the extractive industries (KPMG 2015: 3). Most countries have benefited
from mineral extraction through tax revenues, job creation, technology
transfer, foreign exchange acquisition, and other downstream industries
( Ibid.). Thus, many African countries are highly dependent on mineral
exports in order to sustain their national economies. Mineral fuels (such
as coal and petroleum) account for more than 90% of the export earn-
ings for Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, and Nigeria, while countries
such as Angola, Sierra Leone, Namibia, Zambia, and Botswana rely
heavily on the mining industry as a major source of foreign currency
(KPMG 2015). In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sicomines, a
Sino-Congolese joint venture, obtained a world-class copper reserve,
the Dikulwe-Mashamba concession, and then invested US$9 billion in
roads, railways, and other forms of infrastructure with Chinese finan-
cial backing (Putzel et al. 2011). Similarly, in Mozambique, the Brazilian
mining company Vale is investing $4.4 billion in rebuilding the railway
system from the northern coalmines to the city of Tete (Putzel et al.
2011).
The exploitation of mining and infrastructural investment is creating a
new optimism in Africa about economic development and poverty alle-
viation, as indicated in the Agenda 2063 programs. This is happening
in a complex socioeconomic context. Africa’s population is growing and
increasingly becoming urbanized but at the same time it is the poorest
continent overall and lacks a skilled workforce (Putzel et al. 2011).
However, as mining of Africa’s mineral resources maintains the structural
violence of the colonial era, reaping more profits for foreign investors
rather than local employees, some critics urge caution when describing
the economic benefits that it provides (see, e.g., Butler 2015).
World Heritage and Resource Exploitation

The discovery of substantive deposits of minerals, petroleum, and natural
gas resources in commercially viable quantities in various parts of Africa
near World Heritage properties presents a growing challenge to effec-
tive heritage protection, conservation, and management. Yet, for most
governments, these discoveries are seen as the cornerstone of Africa’s
prosperity and modernity as indicated in Agenda 2063. The exploration
and exploitation are often linked to major infrastructural projects as
outlined above.
Managing the impacts of development activities and resource extrac-
tion in and around heritage properties is a major challenge on the African
continent given the dependence of most economies on this industry. This
is in many ways reflected by the discussions and debates of the State
of Conservation Reports from Africa at the World Heritage Committee
meetings (see UNESCO 2014). An analysis of the State of Conserva-
tion Reports shows that since 1982, most World Heritage properties
in Africa have increasingly being affected by illegal activities (such as
poaching, illegal logging, illegal trade, illegal construction, looting), civil
unrest, war, and deliberate destruction). Approximately 33 sites out
of 129 (or 25%) been subjected to the illegal extraction of geological
resources, occupation/settlement, excavations, and construction as well
as non-sanctioned commercial use (Ibid.). These actions are more preva-
lent in natural properties than on cultural and mixed ones. Some of
these threats might be a result of conditions of poverty prevailing in
and around the World Heritage properties on the continent (Cheval-
lier 2015). These figures indicate that underdevelopment and poverty
may pose a more serious threat to heritage sites; for example, the Selous
Game Reserve in Tanzania is on the UNESCO List of World Heritage
in Danger due to unparalleled levels of poaching. Selous now has 90%
fewer elephants than when it was nominated to World Heritage status
in 1982 (Chevallier 2015). The communities around this property are
some of the poorest in Tanzania (Kideghesho and Mtoni 2008). Poverty
and unemployment also expose the communities to the dangers of illegal
activities organized by unscrupulous outsiders—for example, the elabo-
rate and well-funded illegal hunting of elephants and rhinos. The limited
116 W. Ndoro
resources in such places also lead to conflicts which in turn threaten the
heritage sites—for example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and
Central Africa Republic where the discovery of mineral resources has led
to conflicts in and around World Heritage Sites (Edwards et al. 2013).
Since 1993, as African countries scaled up their resource extrac-
tion, the ‘threat’ of mining and oil and gas extraction has increasingly
become a concern on African World Heritage Sites. Natural proper-
ties have been significantly more affected by extractive industries than
cultural or mixed properties (Chevallier 2015). Globally, World Heritage
in the Asia-Pacific region is also heavily affected by mining, oil, and gas
exploration/exploitation issues.
UNESCO generally holds the view that mineral and oil/gas explo-
ration and exploitation (and their associated infrastructural develop-
ment) are not compatible with the protection of heritage and therefore
cannot be permitted on World Heritage Sites. In 2014, mining, oil, gas,
and quarrying exploration affected 27 natural World Heritage Sites glob-
ally (UNESCO 2014). At the time of writing, there are 13 natural World
Heritage Sites ‘in danger’ in Africa, and more than 15 have ‘significant
concern[s]’ about mineral exploration and exploitation. Recent examples
include the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo (DRC). The vast Congo rainforest has more than a quarter of
the world’s recorded mineral occurrences, and these are concentrated in
three regions of biological endemism: the Cameroon-Gabon Lowlands,
the Eastern DRC Lowlands, and the Albertine Rift Mountains; these
landscapes are currently exposed to threats related to oil prospecting. As
a result, the Virunga World Heritage Site has been on the UNESCO
‘danger list’ for more than 20 years. Similarly, the Selous Game Reserve
in Tanzania is also threatened by proposals for prospecting, the mining
of uranium and dam construction (with the associated infrastructure
development) inside the game reserve. Other sites threatened include
the Comoé National Park (Côte d’Ivoire); Mount Nimba Strict Nature
Reserve (Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea); Mapungubwe (South Africa); and
Dja Faunal and Wildlife Reserve (Cameroon). Many more sites have
reported the extraction of resources in their close vicinity.
The presence of some of the poorest and most politically marginalized

peoples within and around heritage resources creates difficult discus-
sions as the extractive industry, despite its environmental impact, may
be welcomed because it promises immediate jobs and financial rewards
(Chevallier 2015). Generally, within the African context, the extractive
industries are perceived to be of national or regional importance. They
provide both employment in the mines and other spin-offs downstream.
While it is agreed that World Heritage Sites are a ‘no go’ area in terms
of resource extraction, many countries in Africa face a critical dilemma:
to exploit mineral resources or to protect the heritage. The case of the
Arabian Oryx Sanctuary site clearly indicates some of the dilemmas faced
by governments all over the world. At times, it comes down to two
options: either develop and destroy or protect and wallow in poverty.
Oman, faced with this dilemma, had its Arabian Oryx Sanctuary delisted
(2007) due to the wishes of the government to exploit the oil reserves
at the heritage site. In 2009, the Federal Republic of Germany faced a
similar conundrum with the construction of a four-lane bridge across the
Dresden Elbe Valley which was deemed by UNESCO to be a threat to
the historic city center. This led to the delisting of the site.
Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape
The Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape (MCL) is located in the Shashe-

Limpopo area of South Africa and was nominated to the World Heritage
List in 2003. Its landscape contains evidence of significant cultural and
social changes in the southern African region between AD 900 and 1300.
The landscape has archaeological evidence attesting to the existence of a
state society, which at the time was the largest in the region. This state
had trading connections with Eastern Africa and Asia, demonstrating
the exchange of human cultural values. Scientists have also documented
evidence of climate change in the area, which archaeologists have used
to model the growth and demise of the kingdom based at Mapungubwe
hill. The kingdom thus attests to a culture that became vulnerable to
irreversible change (Pikirayi 2011).
118 W. Ndoro
The area around Mapungubwe is also rich in natural gas, coal,

diamonds, and copper (Deacon and Norton 2003). The World Heritage
Site is located in one of the richest mineral belts of South Africa and
in an area which has the highest level of poverty of any South African
province, with 78.9% of the population living below the national poverty
line (Kwabena and Kwame 2011: 55). Mapungubwe itself is in a district
called Vhembe whose employment rate in 2006 was 49% (Ibid.: 55).
Over the years, mining has contributed to the establishment of the
Mapungubwe National Park and World Heritage Site (Deacon and
Norton 2003). De Beers, which operates the Venetia Diamond Mine
in the vicinity of the World Heritage Site, donated some of its lands
to form part of the core of the World Heritage property. De Beers has
supported conservation and archaeological research and scholarship in
and around Mapungubwe, and this has increased our knowledge of this
cultural landscape. Over the years, the work of Venetia Diamond Mine
near the World Heritage Site of Mapungubwe has never been ques-
tioned. However, the arrival of another mining company, Coal of Africa
Limited, to extract coal at the Vele Colliery attracted the attention of
environmentalist and conservationists who questioned the impacts of
allowing mining activities in such close proximity to a World Heritage
Site. The acceptance of the operations of Venetia Diamond Mine by
the heritage professionals and the concerted effort to reject the Vele
Colliery in many ways exposed the duplicity of the conservationist move-
ment (Chirikure 2014). The argument was no longer about mining and
protecting heritage but about who was actually doing the extraction.
Despite several impact assessments done by consultants, the conservation
professional communities remained opposed to Coal of Africa Limited’s
venture.
In an area with high levels of poverty, the mining companies promised
immediate jobs to poor families. Although tourism had been going on
in the area, no meaningful contribution from this industry was trick-
ling down to the community. While heritage experts were united in
condemning the Vele Colliery, the government of South Africa faced
a dilemma. The need for the cheap energy that the coal from the Vele
Colliery could provide was immense. Given the limited economic benefit
derived from the existing tourism ventures, it is hardly surprising that the
local communities would favor the mining ventures which could in turn
be detrimental to the heritage site.
The Mapungubwe case showcases the debates and issues which
surround the interplay between heritage and the extractive industry on
the African continent. As indicated earlier, Africa requires the energy to
fuel its development, yet this comes at a cost to its heritage. The Mapun-
gubwe area is one of the least developed areas and yet it is rich in mineral
wealth (Rampedi 2011). It can be argued that the proposed extrac-
tive projects can provide much needed infrastructure development, job
creation, and community investment through corporate social respon-
sibility programs (Komen 2010). As Chirikure (2014) points out, such
proposals must be balanced with appropriate environmental and heritage
stewardship. The question is whether development programs can take
into consideration heritage issues and at the same time provide poverty
alleviation.
Heritage and Planning Development

Given its development trajectory, Africa’s exploitation of mineral
resources and infrastructure development will undoubtedly result in the
ongoing destruction of heritage resources—both those already desig-
nated and those not yet known, and this in turn will impact the
social fabric of the continent. This development trajectory demands an
effective resource governance paradigm shift which takes into account
both heritage conservation needs and the social impacts of Africa’s
development drive.
The African Union through its Agenda 2063 positions Africa on the
verge of a concerted development thrust which will transform the conti-
nent. This proposed development is attracting tens of billions of dollars
in foreign investment (Janneh and Ping 2011) and will result in substan-
tial economic growth and development. The desire for the majority of
African countries to attain middle-income status in the next decades has
made the continent experience substantial changes to its cultural land-
scape. However, unless the impacts on both natural and cultural heritage
are taken into consideration at the planning stage, the continent may lose
120 W. Ndoro
some of its priceless jewels. The threats associated with this scale of devel-
opment center on habitat alteration, infrastructure expansion, human
migration, and dam and mine construction. The impact is compounded
by the fact that the heritage sector on the continent is generally weak
in its governance and its voice is rarely present when the development
agenda is discussed.
It is important that heritage practitioners initiate research and studies
to understand the synergies between heritage and sustainable develop-
ment. It is equally important for heritage to initiate and be involved with
some of the activities deemed to enhance the development agenda on the
continent. This will lead to better planning, improved impact assessment,
and mitigation and offsetting mechanisms. Without careful manage-
ment and implementation of Agenda 2063 and the UN Sustainable
Development Goals 2030, the envisioned development and its asso-
ciated secondary effects will have serious impacts on African heritage
and the environment. However, as Chevallier (2015) puts it, if heritage
decisions and input to some of the programs earmarked for the conti-
nent are taken into consideration at the planning stage, there may be
some positive impacts. Improvements in local community livelihoods
would certainly curtail activities like poaching and illegal cultivation and
grazing in heritage designated protected area.
Policy Suggestions
In order to ensure a more fruitful relationship between Africa’s diverse
heritage and development agendas, both national and continental wide
policies and regulations must be developed which:
1. Ensure that heritage professionals and issues are taken into consider-
ation in national and regional development agendas;
2. Do not separate nature and culture in governance structures;
3. Enable communities near and around heritage sites to have mean-
ingful and sustainable livelihoods.
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Communities and the Quotidian
Mega Developments in Africa: Lessons
from the Meroe Dam
Shadia Taha
Heritage and Mega Development

This chapter concentrates on the challenges and complexities of heritage
in the context of contested Mega Development Projects (henceforth
MDPs) focusing on projects located in areas with indigenous1 and/or
local communities.2 Gellert and Lynch define MDPs as ‘projects
which transform landscapes rapidly, intentionally, and profoundly in
very visible ways, and require coordinated applications of capital and
state power’ (2003: 15–16). The US Federal Highway Administration
(FHWA) defines MDPs as ‘projects of a significant cost that attract a
high level of public attention or political interest because of substan-
tial direct and indirect impacts on the community, environment, and
State budgets’ (Capka 2004). MDPs are a double-edged sword, offering
both opportunities and challenges; their benefits can be revolutionary
S. Taha (B)
Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: st446@cam.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_5
128 S. Taha
to a region’s economy, but they also have wide-ranging damaging effects

(Nüsser 2003; World Commission on Dams 2000). It is these damaging
effects, and the need to develop novel ways of solving the diverse needs
of, on the one hand, development and, on the other hand, local cultures,
people, and nature, that is the concern here. This task has become
especially urgent due to the complex interactions created through global-
ization in which the financiers may be on one continent but their actions
affecting people on another.
Politicians and developers promote MDPs as a means of securing
economic progress and as a vehicle to lift countries out of poverty. In
addition to their wider environmental, social, and cultural impacts, thou-
sands of people worldwide are forcibly displaced every year as a result
of MDPs (Penz et al. 2011). The social and cultural costs of involun-
tary relocation posed by MDPs can be as destructive as the ecological
damage that they cause (El Moghraby 2013; World Commission on
Dams 2000). In the overwhelming majority of cases when MDPs cause
community displacement, the communities which have been relocated
are left socially disrupted and economically worse-off (Gellert and Lynch
2003; Ronayne 2006). MDPs anywhere in the world come with moral
and ethical costs. Despite these obvious and well-known costs, projects
are rarely designed with clearly articulated concerns for the well-being of
local communities, their culture, history or way of life (De Wet 2006;
Oliver-Smith 2006; Penz et al. 2011), or their proposed responses tend
to be shallow and do not involve local communities in meaningful ways.
Hathaway describes sub-Saharan Africa’s power infrastructure as the
‘least developed, least accessible, least reliable, most costly to operate,
and, on average, highest priced of any region in the world’ (2010: 1).
Nearly 630 million people live without reliable access to electricity and
790 million people are forced to rely on solid biomass for heat and
cooking (Morrissey 2017; Outlook Africa Energy 2014). Undoubtedly,
dam construction addresses some of these concerns and brings about
several benefits such as water control, enhanced food security, economic
growth, and poverty reduction. Nonetheless, MDPs have numerous
negative effects, and owing to international unease over their impacts,
they became unpopular among key funders in the 1990s. However,
during recent decades the World Bank decided to resume its support for
Mega Developments in Africa: Lessons from the Meroe Dam 129
big dam projects as new funders from China and Brazil started financing
such projects (Bosshard 2013, 2010). As a result, in the late twentieth
century, demands for new dam constructions were met in many devel-
oping countries. It has been estimated that the construction of large dams
during this period has led to the relocation of 40–80 million people
worldwide (World Commission on Dams 2000: 16–17). Wet states that
between 1963 and 1981 over 400,000 were resettled in Africa alone as a
direct result of dam construction (2000: 5).
Africa’s new dams are most commonly supported by Chinese funding
and engineering, as China has expanded its interests in funding a variety
of new African infrastructure projects (Foster 2008; Rotberg 2009).
Between 2001 and 2007, China committed billions of dollars to African
hydropower projects. In this exchange, African countries get the finan-
cial assistance they desperately need, and in return, China gets access to
Africa’s natural resources, which support China’s own industries (Hath-
away 2010). Moreover, China’s support of brutal and dictatorial African
political regimes generally leads to contracts being granted without
involving the public in a democratic decision-making process. Middle-
hurst (2015) argues that Africa’s Chinese debt will ‘contribute toward
another debt crisis’ as it lowers prices for African exports such as raw
materials making it in turn harder to pay off existing loans. More-
over, Chinese companies bring in cheap Chinese labor to work on their
construction projects rather than employing a local workforce. Thus,
Chinese MDPs have negligible effect on unemployment. Tiffen (2014)
emphasis that ‘The lack of sustainability in this trading partnership
creates an inevitable African dependence upon Chinese largess for future
maintenance and rehabilitation of this infrastructure.’ Many people in
the ‘recipient’ African countries still live in poverty and do not feel that
they have benefited from trade with China.3
The heritage sector frequently views development and those involved
with it with apprehension and unease. In many cases, such a standpoint
is perfectly justified. Numerous projects publicized and promoted in the
name of modernization and rejuvenation have paid little or no atten-
tion to the cultural and environmental devastation that they have caused
(Adams 2000; Al-Hakem 1993; McCully 1996). As mentioned above,
130 S. Taha
Fig. 1 Meroe Dam location, Sudan (Source GNU Free Documentation License.
Dam location added by S. Taha)
the twenty-first century has already witnessed a large number of dam-

building projects in Africa, in which heritage related conflicts and
disputes have become common. The Meroe Dam Project in Sudan
(Fig. 1) provides a revealing example of the tensions between local,
national, and international visions of heritage and the relationships
between the landscape, people, memory, heritage, and identity that are
at stake in such projects.
Meroe Dam: An Overview
The Meroe Dam in Northern Sudan is one of the most disputed and
discussed MDPs in Africa today (Fig. 2). It is located in Nubia, an
area which, due to its comparative remoteness, has a distinctive and
unique culture. Nubians’ adapted to the dry climate of the region which
experiences a scarcity of rainfall rendering the Nile the only source of
water for irrigation. For millennia, they developed skills and expertise to
Fig. 2 The River Nile showing the location of Meroe Dam (Source International
Rivers, People, Water, Life. Major Dam Projects in Sudan [P:1]. Date accessed 17
January 2017)
cope with and mitigate the floods and droughts which affect the area
(Bell 2009; Dafalla 1975). Within this fragile area, the Meroe Dam is,
according to International Rivers,4 ‘one of the world’s most destructive
hydropower projects’ (2009) in terms of its devastating impact on indige-
nous groups and the environment. The Meroe Dam was the first dam to
be built on the Nile in Sudan. At the time of its construction, it was
the largest hydropower project undertaken in Africa. In 2009, the Dam
created a 174-km-long lake, submerged 900 villages, and displaced three
indigenous groups, including over 60,000 Manasir5 inhabitants and 10–
15,000 inhabitants from the Amri and Hamdab communities (Askouri
2008, 2004; Lawler 2006). Not only their ancestral lands, but also their
132 S. Taha
homes, date groves, economic assets, distinctive way of life, and unique
architecture were lost under the Dam reservoir. Their riverine culture and
way of life were changed forever as these communities were forcibly relo-
cated away from the Nile. In order to fully understand these impacts,
it is necessary to first comprehend the political context, the economic
reasons, and the particular ways in which the project was carried out.
Dam Building in a Dictatorship
Since Sudan’s former President Omar al-Bashir came to power in 1989,

the country has suffered numerous economic, security and political
obstacles, and domestic discontent. The country endured high inflation,
soaring unemployment, economic adversity, recession, deterioration in
all public services, and a spiraling international debt. To stimulate the
economy, the state stopped all subsidies on essential products, resulting
in public uprisings that were ruthlessly suppressed (Verhoeven 2011).
The ongoing conflicts in Darfur, Kordofan, the Blue Nile, and Eastern
Sudan and the continuing war in South Sudan added further chal-
lenges to the presidency which redirected resources into warfare. The
UN sanctions imposed in 1998 have taken their toll on the citizenry.
In 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for
the president for suspected crimes in Darfur (Country Report 2003).
All the above have resulted in Sudan’s international isolation, particu-
larly from ‘Western’ countries.’ The government imposed Martial Law
in 1999. Under Bashir the media was heavily suppressed, the Supreme
Court and Parliament had limited independence, and unions were
banned. Internally, under such an authoritarian regime, a citizen had no
voice in decision making. This State repression was visible in various
ways throughout the Meroe Dam Project. On 11 April 2019, Bashir
was ousted in a military coup d’etat and subsequently convicted of
corruption.
Dams are often very expensive to build for developing countries.
Although the Dam Implementation Unit (DIU) reported costs of around
$3 billion USD, a study by Verhoeven (2012) indicates that this under-
estimated the actual figure which was closer to $5 billion. Sudan could
have chosen to invest in solar power which would have been both
greener and less destructive. Moreover, and very importantly, the Nile
runs through one of the hottest and driest areas on earth, and it has
been calculated that a substantial loss of water through evaporation from
the reservoir of up to 1,500,000,000 m3 per year can be expected (El
Moghraby 2013). This amounts to about 8% of the total quantity of
water allocated to Sudan in the Nile Waters Treaty (El Moghraby 2013).
When a journalist asked the Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation
‘why do we need dams’? He replied: ‘because dams are development’
(Verhoeven 2015: 116) and stressed that the ‘Meroe Dam contribu-
tion is the greatest developmental project in Sudan’s modern history’
(Ibid.: 148). The government portrayed the dam as the best solution for
securing Sudan’s modernization and development (Dirar et al. 2015).
Consequently, the Dam was well promoted by the Sudanese media
and social media. The government provided free coaches to take people
to see its ‘great achievements.’ The Dam was promoted as a national
project that would solve the country’s energy problems, promote agri-
cultural development, and eradicate poverty. The state was portrayed
as being concerned about the well-being of its citizens and committed
to their technological and economic advancement (El Moghraby 2013;
Dirar et al. 2015). Thus, local resistance to the project was perceived
to be hindering the country’s future economic development. Govern-
ment officials stressed that the project would improve living conditions
in the resettlement areas as the displaced people would be provided with
modern homes, infrastructure, schools, hospitals, access to electricity,
and a better life (informal discussions between the author and a variety
of citizens in Sudan in 2008 and 2009). Owing to the censorship of
local concerns and persistent advertisements on national media showing
images of idealized villages in the resettlement area, the population at
large generally had a good impression of the project. People genuinely
believed that the displaced people had been offered better opportuni-
ties (informal discussions between the author and a variety of citizens in
Sudan in 2008 and 2009).
The decision to build the dam was made by a presidential decree
without the exploration of other alternatives. In 1999, the responsi-
bility for the building of the dam was removed from the Ministry of
Irrigation and Water Resources and a new authority was established
known as the DIU. The DIU was given exceptional powers and was
134 S. Taha
made accountable only to the president. The presidential decree (2007

decree No. 217) exempted the DIU from civil service laws that other
institutions are obliged to follow, including the service retirement law,
national social insurance fund law, civil servant’s accountability law,
and fiscal and accounting law. Special legal status excused the DIU
from public accountability and gave it immunity from legal action
and auditing (Article 13 of the presidential decree) (Dirar et al. 2015;
Hashim, 2009). Subsequently, the DIU’s authority was extended into
other infrastructure projects. The DIU was responsible for the provision,
preparation, and execution of the Dam’s funding activities and had full
control over its multi-billion dollar budgets. The operational activities of
the DIU did not follow standard parliamentary or administrative proce-
dures, and its activities were not open for discussion by parliament. This
institutional arrangement caused tension with other ministries which had
overlapping remits with the DIU. Hashim states that the DIU was given
a free hand to act as an ‘authority above the law of the state’ (2009: 32).
Within this setup, the concerns of local communities and their cultures
were overlooked.
Funding the Dam: Economic Motivations
The main global players supporting Sudanese development and dam-

building efforts are the Gulf States, Egypt, and China. China’s policy
of non-interference combined with its urgent need for natural resources
means that it is willing to work with fragile states to which the West
has denied financial assistance because of a lack of stability, good gover-
nance, and concerns regarding human rights. In addition, Africa provides
a vast market for China’s merchandise (Hathaway 2010; Poplack 2014).
A number of political analysts consider the role of China in Africa as a
new type of colonialism (e.g., Esposito et al. 2014; The Economist 2013).
In the twenty-first century, China is by far the largest financier and
investor in Africa taking over from European funders who dominated
the continent through colonial rule and later neocolonial manipulation.
Egypt has various motives for supporting Sudan’s hydropower devel-
opment since Sudanese dams help to reduce the sediment reaching Lake
Nasser (the lake created by the Aswan High Dam) while not having
a negative impact on the water flow (Swain 2011). Most decisively, in
light of the emergence of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI),6 which poses a
serious threat to the downstream state’s control over use of the flows,
Egypt recognizes the importance of Sudan as an ally in negotiations.
Furthermore, population pressures within Egypt and limitations on food
production have been driving forces behind cooperation with Sudan to
facilitate migration, labor, and agriculture (Ali 2010).
Middle Eastern countries including Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel,
and the Gulf States have also fostered economic relationships with
Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia as the latter’s alliances formed by their
former colonial relationships have weakened (Bruke 2016). The Dubai
Chamber of Commerce and Industry states that sub-Saharan Africa is a
lucrative area for Gulf capital and that Gulf States can capitalize from its
potential as a secure food source (Fatah Al Rahman 2014). As a conse-
quence of the 2008 global economic crises, the Gulf States have become
determined to ensure their food security and self-sufficiency. Given their
lack of arable land and adequate freshwater resources for agriculture,
Gulf countries have encouraged public and private companies to invest
in agriculture abroad, mostly in Africa and Asia (Shiferaw 2016).
Gulf investments in agriculture have been termed ‘land grabbing’ and
have been criticized by many analysts, human rights activists, and envi-
ronmentalists (Odhiambo 2011). They indicate the negative cost of these
massive land deals: from restrictions on locals’ access to water and grazing
land to the forced displacement of local communities without appro-
priate compensation (Shiferaw 2016). In Sudan, by a presidential decree,
land in the River Nile State and the Northern States in North Sudan
was confiscated from the relevant state authorities and handed over to
the authority of the DIU, which eventually leased it to Arab investors
for agricultural purposes (Hashim 2009; Elhadary and Abdelatti 2016).
Such land grabs in Sudan amounted to 4.0 million hectares of land by
2016 (Elhadary and Abdelatti 2016: 28). This practice is continuing to
escalate; for instance, in 2016 Sudan leased another 420,000 hectares in
the eastern part of Sudan to Saudi Arabia for 99 years. These complex
national and international economic interests and deals demonstrate how
removed from the local the decisive interests were, and also that the
136 S. Taha
central concerns were being played out at a geopolitical scale of some

complexity.
Cultural Impact and the Rescue Campaign
The Meroe Dam threatened Nubia’s heritage which has regional,

national, and global significance. The region has been densely popu-
lated since 3500 B.C.E, yet remains underexplored and understudied
(Askouri 2004; Al-Hakem 1993). In response, in 2003, the Sudanese
National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) made an
international appeal for help to rescue Nubian antiquities threatened by
the dam. Their appeal did not garner the same level of response as the
Aswan Dam appeal did in 1959 (see Hassan 2007). In response to the
Meroe appeal, only a dozen foreign expeditions participated in the rescue
operation which followed.7 The project, which began in 2003, was led
by the Sudan Archaeological Society and the British Museum, and aimed
to salvage as much archaeological material as possible before the Dam’s
inauguration in 2009.
Archaeologists had very limited time and funding to carry out their
work. Sudan did not receive any help or financial aid from UNESCO.
Additionally, the DIU paid merely $587,000 toward the whole rescue
operation, a fraction of the total budget for the Dam (Ali et al. 2010:
34). As Sudan does not have any laws in place requiring developers to
contribute to survey and/or excavation costs, the international teams
involved were self-financed by their institutions with some funding
provided by the American Packard Humanities Institute (Kleinitz and
Näser 2011). Usually, the National Corporation for Antiquities and
Museums (NCAM) offers foreign expeditions the possibility of keeping
10% of their finds (1999 Ordinance). To encourage international Insti-
tutions to assist with the salvage operation, the Director General offered
an incentive for the participating institutions of the right to keep 50%
of the finds (Lawler 2006: 40).
It is estimated that over 2500 new sites were discovered during the
survey including settlements, ceramic deposits, cemeteries, rock art, sites
dated to the first Nubian Kingdom of Kush, New Kingdom Egyp-

tian sites, Nubian tower houses, pyramids, medieval churches, Christian
frescos, stone tools, human remains, Islamic sites, and Stone Age sites
(Lawler 2006; The University of Chicago News Office 2007). The
actual number of newly discovered sites hugely exceeds the figure quoted
above. According to the British Museum’s Derek Welsby, the Sudan
Archaeological Research Society (SARS) concession alone recorded 2000
sites (Pers. Comm. 14th August 2017). The grand total discovered by
all participating teams will quite possibly exceed 5000 newly discovered
sites (ibid.). Unfortunately, the vast majority of these newly recorded
sites were submerged under the new lake before any major excavations or
recording of the artifacts could be undertaken. There was a race against
time by the various archaeological expeditions to excavate and save the
heritage, but given the number of newly discovered sites they were only
able to scratch the surface (Lawler 2006; The University of Chicago
News Office 2007). Out of their concession’s 2000 new sites, SARS exca-
vated twenty-two sites (Pers. Comm. Welsby 15 August 2017). While
the total number of sites partially excavated in the affected area did not
exceed two hundred, several factors contributed to the small number of
sites excavated. One major cause was that excavations were brought to a
sudden and unexpected halt (a point that I will return to later).
Impact of the Dam on Indigenous Groups
The Nile valley is a very unique place, not just because of its rich archae-
ological record but due to the close and unique connection between
people and their environment. Both Crowfoot (1919) and Dafalla
(1975) describe how the Nile and the date palm groves, which it nour-
ished, were the most distinctive features of Nubian life. The palm groves
were the Nubian’s most valuable possession and main source of income.
Individual trees could be mortgaged, sold, and inherited. Every part
of the tree was used and nothing was wasted. The date palms were
the symbol of Nubian identity and rootedness in the land. Moreover,
the trees had a symbolic value and featured in all local ceremonies
138 S. Taha
(Fig. 3). The River Nile itself was the mainstay of the Nubian culture
and economy; it was the center of life. All Nubian ceremonies involved
visiting the Nile and drinking its water (Figs. 4 and 5). Place was thus
a central aspect of the local communities’ sense of identity and culture.
Overall, the Dam construction affected the traditional inhabitants of the
area in very detrimental ways, including the loss of their heritage and
land.
The indigenous communities living along this stretch of the Nile were
poorly informed about the scale and extent of the damage the Dam
would impose, as well as details of the arrangements made for their
relocation or compensation. They strongly resisted the government and
many refused to be moved away from the Nile. They requested reset-
tlement along the banks of the new reservoir (Dirar et al. 2015; El
Moghraby 2013). In 2008, the DIU opened the floodgates unexpect-
edly and without any prior notice, forcing local communities to flee for
their lives, deserting their homes and their belongings (Askouri 2008).
The unanticipated sudden flooding caused a severe humanitarian disaster
Fig. 3 Lush palm groves along the riverbanks (Photo credit: McMorrow May
2017)
Fig. 4 Lost cultural and social landscapes (Photo credit: McMorrow May 2017)
Fig. 5 Lost familiar surroundings (Photo credit: McMorrow May 2017)
which was exacerbated when the authorities denied relief and support
agencies, as well as reporters and journalists, access to the region (Sudan
Tribune 2008). The severity of the incidents attracted widespread inter-
national condemnation (Sudan Tribune 2008). Peaceful protests were
met with brutal confrontation by the DUI’s security forces (Bosshard
140 S. Taha
2008; International Rivers Network 2008). Several representative Dam-

Affected Committee members (Lagnat Al Moutadrereen Bl Khazan)
were arrested by DIU forces, some protesters were killed, and voices of
disapproval were suppressed (Dirar et al. 2015).
The arrangements for compensation, the resettlement plans, and their
implementation were conducted by the DUI. People were very poorly
compensated and those who refused to move were not compensated at
all. Displaced farmers were given new plots, but these were in infertile,
sandy, desert areas. Harvests were so poor that they had nothing to sell
(Figs. 6 and 7). A survey conducted in early 2005 shows that poverty
among the displaced people spread rapidly (Bosshard and Hildyard
2005). The poverty rate has continued to spiral, and by 2007, fami-
lies began to abandon the resettlement areas for the slums of Khartoum
(Dirar et al. 2015). Moreover, as Nomadic groups did not possess title
deeds for their lands, they were not offered any form of compensation
and were therefore particularly adversely affected by the construction
Fig. 6 Failed agriculture in the new resettlement areas (Source Dirar et al. 2015.
Photo credit: Mark Zeitoun April 2017)
Fig. 7 Re-settlement areas, showing their distance from the Nile. Water from
a drinking tank can be seen from the distance (Source Dirar et al. 2015. Photo
credit: Mark Zeitoun April 2017)
of the Dam as their customary land rights disappeared (Elhadary and

Abdelatti 2016).
Clashes Between Archaeologists and Indigenous Groups
Sudanese heritage legislation was not designed to cope with challenges

of this scale and complexity. It is predominantly concerned with the
protection of ‘relics,’ with heritage understood solely as archaeological
heritage. This understanding was adopted by the salvage project (Kleinitz
and Näser 2011; Taha 2009). The focus of the salvage operation was
accordingly the physical archaeological remains with less attention paid
to contemporary people and their notions of heritage. A clash erupted
between the Manasir (the main group affected) and NCAM regarding
the ownership of excavated artifacts. Sudanese Antiquities Law states that
‘All relics or objects of archaeological interest, whether buried deep in
the earth or found on the surface, are considered property of the state’
(Article 4:4.1 Ordinance 1999: 2). Yet, the Manasir wanted the artifacts
to remain in ‘their’ area. In a similar vein, the location of the museum
proposed for the region gave rise to further disputes between NCAM
and Manasir. Initially, NCAM offered to build a museum in the resettle-
ment area, but it did not honor this and decided to build the museum
at the Dam site instead (Hafsaas-Tsakos 2011; Leturcq 2009). Commu-
nity representatives strongly opposed the building of the museum outside
the region inhabited by the affected people, especially at the site of
the Dam, which is not only a symbol of the destruction of their land
and their displacement, but also located in the territory of the neigh-
boring tribe. Community leaders lamented ‘our history has been given to
142 S. Taha
another community’ (Lawler 2006). An expert in cultural heritage at the

UNESCO Cairo Office supported the ownership claims of the Manasir
directly by stating that ‘the excavated artifacts are the people’s cultural
property’ (De Simone 2008: 229). The DIU nonetheless funded a new
museum and a tourist resort in the Dam area, inaugurated in 2009.
In 2006, the desperate communities appealed to archaeologists to use
their influence to delay the flooding of the reservoir, to raise interna-
tional awareness of their ordeal, and to ensure that the museum would
be built in their tribal territory echoing their appeals to the compa-
nies involved in the Dam’s construction (Hildyard 2008). The Manasir
attempted to mobilize archaeology as a political instrument to nego-
tiate better outcomes for their community. Archaeologists responded to
the appeal by arguing that as a neutral party they had ‘little power or
influence’ (ibid.: 8). As a result, the Manasir leadership asked archaeol-
ogists to leave their territory (Welsby 2008). Archaeologists working in
Sudan at the time had not engaged with the community, or acknowl-
edged their oppression by the State and the DIU. In response to this
passivity, locals believed that the archaeologists worked for (or at least
with) the government, and hence, were implicated in their resettlement
and mistreatment.
The first archaeologists to be expelled from the Manasir territory were
the team from the University of Delaware (in 2006). They worked on the
fortress of El Kab for one day. The next mission expelled was the team
from Humboldt University who was forced to leave six days after their
arrival; most other teams working in the area were subsequently forced
to leave (Kleinitz 2008; Welsby 2008). The teams that returned to the
Manasir region for the 2007 and 2008 seasons were denied entrance to
the area (Welsby 2008). In response, foreign teams were given other areas
to work in by the NCAM, these areas were outside the 4th Cataract.
Some teams volunteered to stay outside the region. The teams from the
Gdansk Archaeological Museum and the Oriental Institute in Chicago,
for example, accepted the decision of the Manasir and decided to work
in the Shaigiya tribal area instead. The efforts of teams from Cologne
and Hungary to discuss the conflict with the local Manasir leaders were,
however, futile (Lawler 2006).
The Manasir’s action took archaeologists by surprise. Some archaeolo-

gists were unaware of the extent of the suffering and hardships endured
by the community. As a result, some expeditions managed to conduct
short-term side projects led by anthropologists, social geographers, and
architects with the aim of documenting the cultural and economic life
of the Manasir. For example, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs
enabled HUNE to conduct a social-geographical survey in their 2005
season in the 4th Cataract region. However, when the DIU in 2006
announced plans to construct a further ten dams in Sudan with at least
seven in Northern Sudan (Fig. 8), indigenous groups decided to prohibit
archaeological work in these territories (Dirar et al. 2015).
Fig. 8 Proposed dams on the River Nile–Sudan (Source African Energy 2012)
144 S. Taha
Discussion: Embracing the Cultural Landscape

in Sustainable Development
As the example of the Meroe Dam illustrates vividly, MDPs in Sudan
and other African contexts threaten cultural heritage in its various forms
and often entail large-scale community displacement. In recent years,
community consultation and participation has become a common prac-
tice in heritage management (Hafsaas-Tsakos 2011). Several UNESCO
conventions, for example, the Convention for the Safeguarding of the
Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the Protection
and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2003, 2005; 2010;
UN 2007) have sought to outline policies which intend to empower local
communities. Yet, in the Meroe Dam case, heritage professionals failed
to involve the local communities whose heritage they were ‘saving’ (Naser
and Kleintiz 2011).
It is important, therefore, to appreciate why this was the case, what
factors influenced the situation, and how it developed. The professional
imperative to engage with local, and indigenous communities, as well
as their intangible heritage, raises new challenges. The complexity of
the political and economic situation in Sudan at the time moved atten-
tion away from the local, as decisions were being formed by national
and even international interests. In addition, various factors affected the
ways in which decisions were being made and carried out, these involved
time constraints, limited funds, a shortage of trained staff in the antiq-
uities service, the enormous number of sites to be rescued, the discovery
of large numbers of unknown and unexpected sites, and the lack of
coherent plans for the ‘rescue’ of the intangible heritage. In addition,
the Sudanese Antiquities Law did not provide guidance for rescue at this
scale and the archaeological profession took a rather passive role. These
factors combined marginalized the living culture and the everyday way
of life of the local communities. As stressed by Kleinitz and Naser, ‘the
modern people of the region were effectively relegated to being mere
bystanders of history, not much more than an afterthought to a long
and interesting sequence of human settlement in this remote part of the
Middle Nile Valley’ (2012: 1).
In response to the possible lessons from the Meroe Dam Project, I

suggest it is necessary to include provisions for the protection of intan-
gible heritage in all salvage projects. This will necessitate involvement
of local communities who are the caretakers of such heritage—without
them, the intangible heritage can neither be recognized nor continue.
This point, and the need for establishing procedures and standards, has
become more widely recognized. The codes of ethics for both the World
Archaeological Congress (WAC) and the Australian Archaeological Asso-
ciation (AAA) explicitly endorse an obligation to indigenous people.
WAC requests their members to ‘acknowledge the importance of indige-
nous cultural heritage, including sites, places, objects, artefacts, human
remains, to the survival of indigenous cultures’ (the World Archaeo-
logical Congress 1990). Likewise, the AAA calls for their members to
‘acknowledge the importance of cultural heritage to Indigenous commu-
nities’ (Australian Archaeological Association 1991). In principle, these
ethical guidelines apply anywhere in the world, but in practice they have
yet to take root in many regions. On the basis of the Meroe Dam case,
it is clear that these principles ought to be exercised as guidelines, and
the necessary change of praxis excercised at all levels. One way of doing
this would be to encourage the national antiquities services to embrace
ethical codes that ensure this awareness and attention toward local and
indigenous communities.
The Meroe Dam Salvage Project took a top-down approach. Archae-
ologists took the role of the experts who have the knowledge and the
authority to decide what is significant, and what is to be rescued,
without consulting the community. And by doing so, they reinforced
national and universal values, but ignored local ones. Their selection
supported official and universal heritage values over bottom-up unof-
ficial ones. While it is true that professionals were pressed for time and
resources, they neglected the importance of contemporary living culture
and did not engage with local community understandings of heritage.
No wonder the local people came to regard archaeologists as prioritizing
dead remains above the needs of the living communities. They frequently
asked archaeologists ‘why they put so much effort into studying the “dead
stones” rather than giving attention to the living people’ (Kleinitz and
Näser 2011: 260).
146 S. Taha
Archaeologists have also been criticized for not supporting the idea
of a local museum for the people of the 4th Cataract. The community
lost everything; a museum would have offered something to hold on
to, a place of memory and identity for them and their children (Taha
2014a; 2014b). Manasir indigenous heritage is a living heritage,8 which
will soon be a dead one or at least radically transformed. As highlighted
by Ruggles and Silverman (2009: 8), ‘The meaning of heritage to living
people, their memory and identity should not be underestimated.’ It is
insensitive to tell communities whose lives have been threatened, whose
lives have been turned upside down, as they face an insecure future, that
archaeologists are saving their heritage as it is ‘significant to mankind.’
As noted by Williams, ‘Culture can never be reduced to artefacts while
it is being lived’ (1961: 310).
These complex interconnections between people, places, and heritage
strongly suggest that heritage impact assessments need to be fully inte-
grated in the planning and construction of MDPs, and not merely
superficially addressed as part of environmental assessments.9 Commu-
nities must be involved in meaningful ways throughout the planning
process. The Meroe Dam Project rendered Nubian indigenous groups the
victims of development. They lost not only their homeland, but also their
heritage. They were removed from their past and present. Local commu-
nities have been stripped of their homes, land, and culture in a series
of heavy-handed evictions. Most importantly, what happened in the 4th
Cataract is now happening in the wake of MDPs all over Africa; local
communities have been brutally displaced in the name of development.
Is this development for the benefit of all or merely the exploitation of
marginalized groups and their land in the interests of oppressive political
regimes and foreign interests?
The Meroe Dam Salvage Project was immensely successful in uncov-
ering new evidence and enriching our knowledge of the past in the 4th
Cataract region. But its work also raised a series of ethical questions
related to the role of archaeology in the context of disputed MDPs.
The case study suggests that we urgently need to give more atten-
tion to values that relate to attachments, traditional practices, and the
wealth of knowledge and skills that are transmitted through generations.
Professionals need to learn how to recognize value and protect such
cultural forms. Certainly, in this specific case there were limitations

and constraints regarding funding and political circumstances, which
presented a number of challenges and complexities. However, it is worth
asking whether in fact the outcome of the salvage project and displace-
ment would have been different if it took place in a democratic country?
And would professional attention in such contexts similarly be focused
on the salvage of as many sites as possible, while overlooking community
values, participation, and consultation?
Traditional practices provide communities with a sense of identity,
belonging, history, and continuity. They rely on the transmission of skills
and practices that have been gained over generations. These processes
are central to the continuation of skills and heritage which are used,
lived, experienced, and increasingly seen as valuable in a globalized
world. The question of how to ‘rescue’, or help the continuation of,
intangible heritage rooted in everyday social life does, however, pose a
substantial challenge. There is probably no universally applicable solu-
tion as different circumstances require different responses. It is, therefore,
necessary that enough time is given within the development timetable
to allow the best solution for a given context to emerge. Approaches
need to be tailor-made to fit specific political, economic, historical,
and social contexts. Most importantly, rescuing knowledge and skills
necessitates community involvement and participation to understand
what a community values and wants to save and pass on to their chil-
dren. Furthermore, the discussion and exchange of ideas with affected
communities on how to maintain knowledge and experiences after the
development, is vital.
The handling of the Meroe Dam case has triggered questions and
debates regarding the professional neutrality of archaeologists who were
associated with a contested development project that involved human
rights violations on the part of the developer. The salvage project ignored
the impacts of the project on local communities, even at the cost
of the communities’ lives and livelihoods (Hildyard 2008). The case
highlights the importance of consulting and engaging with stakeholder
communities, and involving all of the relevant professionals in these
processes.
148 S. Taha
Policy Suggestions
What mechanisms are needed to improve future MDPs projects in

Africa? This question is complex. I am not offering an answer, but suggest
the following points for consideration in future MDPs:
1. Heritage assessments must be included in the project planning stages

to guarantee sufficient time for preparation and execution.
2. Legislation in most African countries is still firmly fixed on protecting
physical heritage. It is necessary for African countries to update their
legislation to incorporate a broader definition of heritage (including
the ‘living’ aspects of heritage) so as to achieve sustainable develop-
ment in all its dimensions.
3. The majority of African countries lack the financial resources to fund
rescue projects. It should therefore be compulsory for developers to
pay a percentage of the development budget directly to the rele-
vant heritage management agencies to enable them to undertake the
necessary work.
Notes
1. In 1997, the United Nations Working Group concluded that a defi-
nition of indigenous peoples at the global level was not achievable at
that time, and not essential for the adoption of the Draft Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Article 8 of the Draft Declaration
states that:‘Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which,
having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies
that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other
sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them.
They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined
to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral terri-
tories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as
peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions
and legal system’. The three tribes displaced by the Meroe Dam are groups
who lived along the river banks in the 4th Cataract area for centuries.
2. The concept of community is fluid and complex as there are multiple

communities and a range of definitions of what community is. The Oxford
Dictionary defines community as ‘A group of people living in the same
place or having a particular characteristic in common’. Waterton and Smith
argue that heritage practitioners often adopt a notion of community that is
‘too simplistic and romantic’ (2013: 10). I therefore encourage the reader at
this point to recognize that these tribe’s ‘communities’ have deep roots but
also that they have changed radically over the last century due to the influ-
ence of transcultural ideas and practices. Today, these tribes are comprised
of individuals who hold different attitudes towards the past and aspirations
for the future. Within each ‘group’, which are often erroneously depicted
as internally homogenous, there are conflicts and power struggles coupled
with battles related to pervasive poverty and a general lack of education.
3. This example is one of numerous cases from Sudan. A Chinese businessman
started his own construction company, and because of corrupt officials, he
bought a Sudanese Passport. He employs only Chinese staff and labor. In
addition, he bought land and not only accommodates all his staff, but also,
they grow their own vegetables and keep animals for food. Unemployment
is high and there is resentment by ordinary Sudanese. They commented
‘What is left of Sudan? The government sold everything’ (informal discus-
sions between the author and a variety of citizens in Sudan in 2008 and
2009).
4. International Rivers is an environmental and human rights NGO, based in
Berkeley, California. It was founded in 1985. Their aim is stated on their
web site ‘We seek a world where healthy rivers and the rights of local
communities are valued and protected. We envision a world where water
and energy needs are met without degrading nature or increasing poverty,
and where people have the right to participate in decisions that affect their
lives’.
5. Dar Al Manasir (Al Manasir Home land) is in the region of the 4th Cataract
of the Nile. The Manasir have lived in the area for centuries. They practice
limited agriculture on the banks of the River Nile—dates are their primary
source of income. Some of the Manasir live as nomads who move seasonally
to the riverbanks.
6. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) is an intergovernmental partnership of 10
Nile Basin countries, namely Burundi, DR Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya,
150 S. Taha
Rwanda, South Sudan, the Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. Eritrea partici-
pates as an observer. Established in 1999, it seeks to provide a forum for
consultation and coordination among the Basin States.
7. Several foreign institutions were involved in the salvage archaeology
program including: ACACIA project University of Cologne, Gdarisk
Archaeological Museum Expeditions (GAME), Polish Academy of Sciences;
Humboldt University of Berlin, Italian Institute for Africa and the
Orient (ISIAO), University College London, Sudan Archaeological Research
Society, Hungarian Meroe Foundation, University of California at Santa
Barbara, Arizona State University consortium, and the Oriental Institute
Museum, University of Chicago.
8. ICCROM defines living heritage as the attachments, practices, experiences,
traditions, and skills that are passed down through generations and continue
to be practiced and are relevant in the present (Wijesuriya 2016).
9. For instance, the South Africa National Environmental Management Act
(Act 107 of 1998) deals with cultural heritage as part of the Environmental
Impact Assessment process.
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Heritage and Sustainability: Challenging
the Archaic Approaches to Heritage
Management in the South African Context
Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu
Communities and the Fortress Conservation

Paradigm
While cultural heritage managers, mirroring the practice of nature
conservators, now use the language of ‘cooperation’ with local commu-
nities, such a relationship is still defined by legislation that is very
Eurocentric and thus does not consider traditional management systems
(see Ndlovu 2009a, 2011 for a detailed discussion). As a result, the
involvement of local communities in heritage management is, in my
view, simply employed to enhance the ‘feel good’ factor and to satisfy
bureaucratic expectations. I will strongly argue that the apartheid era
approach to nature conservation still underpins much contemporary
heritage management in the sense that sites are heritagised by excising
N. Ndlovu (B)
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Pretoria,
Pretoria, South Africa

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_6
158 N. Ndlovu
them from everyday life. I shall illustrate this point through the discus-
sion of the eMakhosini Valley case study (located in KwaZulu-Natal
Province, South Africa), showing how the view that residential use and
heritage preservation are not compatible, continues to reverberate. This
position explains why, for example, a portion of uKhahlamba Drak-
ensberg Park was not recognized as part of the World Heritage Site
in 2001, and how as a result there is a communally owned non-
designated exclave within the World Heritage Site. In the context of
this paper, local community is defined geographically, thus meaning
people living in close proximity to a given heritage site. Despite the
connections between communities and these spaces, clear boundaries
have been forged between heritage sites which can be visited by tourists
and other areas classified as being for residential and everyday purposes.
Given the pervasiveness of this ‘Fortress Conservation’ paradigm (Peluso
1993; Brockington 2002; Meskell 2011), I argue that there is tension
between heritage management and local communities, and that this is
often further exasperated by business interests.
As a contribution to discussions of the tension within heritage
management as it is practiced in South Africa (see further discus-
sion below; Ndlovu 2009a, 2011) and in recognition of the need to
develop heritage sites for tourism and other benefits, I review the case
of aMakhosini Valley in KwaZulu-Natal. I shall focus on the relocations
decided upon by what was then known as the Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali
(now renamed the KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and Research Institute) when
they bought land identified for the project. They have not succeeded in
implementing the full scope of their project. The KwaZulu-Natal Amafa
and Research Institute is the Provincial Heritage Resources Agency estab-
lished by the KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and Heritage Institute Act (no. 5
of 2018)—a second-tier management level in South Africa. The insti-
tute replaced the Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali which had been established
in 1997 under the KwaZulu-Natal Heritage Act. The other two tiers
are: national level (South African Heritage Resources Agency) and local
level (local municipalities). In the following section, I shall set the
scene by providing a brief review of the historical significance of the
eMakhosini Valley which serves as a case study to highlight the tension
between heritage managers and local communities. I further focus on
Heritage and Sustainability: Challenging the Archaic Approaches … 159
what led to the tensions between the provincial heritage authority (the
KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and Research Institute) and the local communi-
ties. The final section shall address whether sustainability and heritage
management can ever be comfortable neighbors.
eMakhosini Valley in KwaZulu-Natal

eMakhosini Valley, or the ‘Valley of the Kings,’ is an area located on
the banks of the White Umfolozi River, about 10 km from uLundi,
the former capital city of the KwaZulu ‘homeland’ (an area set aside for
the African population to ‘self-govern’ during the apartheid era) and the
province of KwaZulu-Natal between 1994 and 2004 (Fig. 1). The area is
defined by a long archaeological history, known to date back to the Stone
Age. It is also home to places marking more recent history. The founder
of the Zulu nation, 200 years old in 2016, was born in this valley. Not
far from the eMakhosini Valley is uMgungundlovu, the Royal Palace of
King Dingane kaSenzangakhona. This area became a battleground in
the late 1800s between amaZulu and the Dutch settlers known as the
Fig. 1 Location of eMakhosini Valley, or the ‘Valley of the Kings’, in KwaZulu-

Natal Province (Map courtesy of Tim Forssman, 2019)
160 N. Ndlovu
Voortrekkers, led by Piet Retief who had come to seek land in the area.
Retief and his military personnel were subsequently killed and buried in
the valley, in an area known as KwaMatiwane where a memorial was
erected in 1922 in their honor. He was an important political figure
for the Voortrekkers and one of the leading figures during the ‘Great
Trek’ (the migration by Voortrekkers in search of greener pastures into
the interior of what later became South Africa). Within a few kilome-
ters of the Valley are other significant historic battlefields including the
site of the last battle of the so-called Anglo-Zulu War at Ondini. It was
during this war that King Cetshwayo was defeated by the army led by
Lord Chelmsford in 1879.
Further significance arises from the name eMakhosini which denotes
it as royal and spiritual land that is the resting place for seven of the
Zulu Kings, namely King Nkosinkulu, King Zulu (after whom the Zulu
nation is named), King Phunga, King Mageba, King Ndaba, King Jama,
and King Senzangakhona kaJama (father to the three Zulu Kings, Shaka,
Dingane, and Mpande). While born in the eMakhosini landscape, the
founder of the Zulu nation as we understand it today, King Shaka kaSen-
zangakhona, is buried in KwaDukuza near his KwaBulawayo Palace. This
abbreviated history highlights eMakhosini’s deep historical meaning and
sacred significance to the Zulu nation.
Over time, this area became home not only to the Zulu Royal family
but also to many commoners and white settlers. The latter owned
farms that were purchased by the KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and Research
Institute (hereafter Amafa) in the late 1990s. Motivated by the histor-
ical significance of the eMakhosini Valley, Amafa began purchasing
farms in the area in 1999. At the time, Amafa was a two-year old
heritage resources authority established following the amalgamation
of the KwaZulu Monuments Council and the National Monuments
Council. According to Amafa, this area did not just have regional or
national significance, its uniqueness positioned it for consideration as a
UNESCO World Heritage Site. People already lived on this land when
Amafa expressed and acted on its ambitions; this is not disputed by
Amafa. The question is, why has it been so difficult for heritage managers
to consider conserving a landscape rich in heritage whilst maintaining
its quotidian use by its inhabitants? It could be argued that the diffi-
culty with considering such a scenario is rooted in the impression that
the presence of local communities can be a threat to the integrity of the
heritage resources concerned.
According to Ndoro (2001), there is a perception within the heritage
management fraternity that local indigenous communities are not inter-
ested in managing heritage resources. Yet, had this been the case,
a number of these heritage resources would not be in existence as
they would have been destroyed by these ‘uncaring’ communities. This
tension is well known and has been discussed at length (see Pwiti 1996;
Taruvinga and Ndoro 2003; Ndoro 2005; Pwiti and Ndoro 1999; Ndoro
and Pwiti 2001). These authors consistently point to the problem-
atic nature of a Eurocentric legislative framework that is unwelcoming
of traditional approaches to heritage management. These traditional
approaches are seen as destructive and must therefore be prevented to
safeguard the integrity of these heritage sites (see also Ndlovu 2009a,
2011). What these confrontations illustrate is that authoritative and
academic power is still oppressive in terms of how heritage is defined.
Moreover, it now appears that these elements can only be transformed
through implementation of programmes that specifically aim to bring
about meaningful change (see Shepherd 2002, 2003; Ndlovu 2009b, c).
In the same way that nature conservationists could not see a direct
link between people, animals, and biodiversity during apartheid (and
one could argue that there are even problems to this day, see Luckett
et al. 2003), Amafa never considered the possibility that the continued
significance of the landscape could be better conserved and enhanced if
the same indigenous communities that define its importance remained
living in their households. Because of this short-sightedness, a number
of homesteads were relocated to another farm owned by Amafa. Amafa
offered the relocated occupants of eMakhosini minimal compensation.
The idea was that the householders had to be relocated for the successful
management of heritage in the area. It was not conceivable for them that
people could co-exist with appropriately managed heritage.
The intention to relocate identified households began hitting a dead-
end when they refused to move to Vaalbank Farm which had been
purchased, without consultation, as the destination for the relocated
162 N. Ndlovu
families. Amongst the reasons given, according to the Amafa files,

community members argued that at Vaalbank they would be far from
schools and would not have access to adequate grazing land. I argue
that this large-scale and highly ambitious project of purchasing land was
an initiative informed by archaic approaches to heritage management,
which we sadly still see being employed to this day. I have no doubt that
this approach is deeply defined by the apartheid approach to conser-
vation, where, as stated earlier, people and conservation are deemed
incompatible. It is worth highlighting here that as part of the larger
project, Amafa and Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife, the provincial
authority for nature conservation, came together to establish eMakhosini
Ophathe Heritage Park to ‘recreate the ancient cultural and natural land-
scape, first settled in the 17th century by Zulu people’ (Sibiya 2009: 2).
Introducing wildlife was considered integral to the development of the
park as the animals would increase the potential of tourism. As I shall
discuss below, one of the most substantial complaints was that the intro-
duction of wildlife brought ticks to the valley which negatively impacted
the health of local livestock. A python was also introduced into the park,
7 km away from the land occupied by communities. Although it was
explained that this snake was not dangerous and was introduced into its
natural habitat (and at a fair distance from the households), community
members complained vehemently about this.
The stated ambition of Amafa was to purchase the farms (with finan-
cial assistance from the provincial government) to establish a heritage
park in order to manage these landscapes in perpetuity. The provin-
cial government, at the time led by the then Premier Sibusiso Ndebele,
approved substantial funds (R20 million) for this project in order to
purchase the land identified as historically significant, to construct a
multimedia interpretive center, and to erect the Spirit of eMakhosini
memorial. This strategy was informed by the view established from
independent studies which convincingly indicated that tourism was an
important developmental factor within the Zululand Municipal District.
Describing the proposed project, the then CEO of Amafa informed the
media that:
The centre has been designed and is being built by the KwaZulu-Natal
consortium, Vusilela. It will house audio-visual and historical displays,
a restaurant, viewing tower, open amphitheatre and craft market. It is
intended to be the major tourist and educational draw card to the
eMakhosini Valley where most of the early Zulu Kings are buried. The
region is rich in Zulu, British and Boer history and has outstanding
natural beauty. (Amafa 2008)
The film in the audio-visual arena will, it was said, ‘introduce visitors to
Zulu history and how it later became interwoven with that of the British
and Boers who came in the 19th century seeking land out of which so
much conflict arose’ (Amafa 2009). As part of the long-term project to
‘restore’ the historical significance of the area, Amafa constructed the
Spirit of the eMakhosini Memorial which was unveiled in 2003 by His
Majesty King Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu. The memorial is surrounded by
seven horns for the seven Kings buried in the valley, and its aim was
to elevate the history of the Zulu which had been suppressed during
apartheid.
Implementing the Project Plan: Community

Protests
When Amafa purchased this land, the organization asked the Depart-
ment of Land Affairs to fully explain to the affected communities what
rights they had. However, this offer was refused by the community
members, and they did not want to attend meetings organized by Amafa
because they were not happy with the poor consultation when the
project was conceptualized. Eventually, transport was provided to take
the affected communities to uLundi for a meeting which they did then
attend. Following this briefing, Amafa began engaging with the occu-
pants of eMakhosini with a view that they had to relocate. As alluded to
earlier, this approach by the Council of Amafa was deeply influenced by
the apartheid approach to conservation, and it therefore necessitated the
removal of people as they were considered an impediment to conserva-
tion. While some families seemed willing to take the compensation that
164 N. Ndlovu
was being offered, the majority refused to cooperate with the heritage
authority and thus did not move.
The simmering tensions from when Amafa began approaching the
affected families eventually led to protests by community members. For
community leaders, the demand was for Amafa to negotiate with the
approved community structure, the Qangqatho Committee, rather than
to approach individual households. This revealed an attitude of ‘united
we stand, divided we fall.’ Some of the families had been living in the area
for generations and had different living arrangements with the previous
farm owners. For instance, some had lifetime agreements to remain on
the land, meaning their families would have to relocate following the
death of the family leader. Other families were considered by Amafa to
be living near the outskirts of the project area.
By 2000, a year after the purchase of the land, one thing was
clear: Amafa was failing to constructively engage with the Qangqatho
Committee. This was largely because Amafa thought that having the
support of the Nobamba Traditional Authority (a traditional structure
under the leadership of the local Chief managing the affairs of the
community living within its boundaries) would guarantee them success
in their endeavors to relocate the identified households. The strategy
to negotiate with individual households was dealt a significant blow
when community members insisted that negotiations must be handled
through the Qangqatho Committee. Amafa and its Council had no
meaningful alternative strategy. This angered the community, leading
to a number of protests. The first protest was on December 2, 2000,
culminating in the march by the community to hand over notification
of their grievances to Captain K. Z. Majola of the uLundi South African
Police Service (SAPS). A seven-day ultimatum was given to Amafa by
the community members. In response to the demands from the commu-
nity, Amafa argued on December 11, 2000, in a letter addressed to SAPS
that the proposed project, which in their view was of national signifi-
cance, would create both permanent and temporary employment thus
benefiting the community through the Community Trust that was to be
set up by the Nobamba Traditional Authority. In addition, Amafa indi-
cated that community members would be invited to participate in Nguni
cattle farming (a special breed of cattle indigenous to the KwaZulu-

Natal province), and to establish small businesses which would provide
opportunities for tour guides, the sale of crafts, staging of cultural perfor-
mances, dance groups, etc. Amafa further argued that to show their
kindness, the organization had offered a portion of its land to serve as
a communal cemetery. This gesture to provide a final resting place for
those departed, a significant ritual for the affected communities, was not
enough to begin to reconcile the two ‘warring’ parties.
In its further attempts to bring about an agreement, Amafa informed
the community that as part of the bigger project, it had decided to allo-
cate 600 ha from one of its neighboring farms for relocation purposes.
This land was about 20 km away. A number of conditions were attached
to relocation: (i) each family would be compensated to the initial value of
R10 000 for their household, (ii) each family would only be able to keep
two to three head of cattle because of the need to prevent overgrazing
(echoing apartheid laws), and (iii) the Dingane school was to be relo-
cated. Based on living expenses at the time, the initial compensation of
R10 000 seems low. In their 14-year study of relocations undertaken for
mining purposes, the Bench Marks Foundation (van Wyk 2016) estab-
lished that property evaluators use standard urban and suburban criteria
in the evaluation of the affected communal property. As a result, these
evaluations do not take into consideration the newly derived value of the
land based on the resources underground and therefore companies do
not pay market-related compensation when relocating families.
Considering the significance of livestock in rural settings, stipulating
that families could only retain a small number of livestock, was an ill-
informed decision that could never have been accepted by the affected
communities. Cattle have a cultural significance to the amaZulu. They
are used to supplement food during funerals (the skin would have been
used in the past to wrap the body of the deceased prior to the funeral)
and as a payment of the dowry by the groom to the bride’s family
before marriage. Cattle also serve as a status symbol for the head of the
family. The decision to limit the number of cattle each family could
own was never going to offer a practical solution as it would have
meant that a number of families must sell their livestock. This did not,
as a result, lead to a meaningful engagement between Amafa and the
166 N. Ndlovu
Qangqatho Community. The resulting hostilities continued for many

years. Nonetheless, Amafa reported that four families independently
approached the organization requesting relocation.
To illustrate just how convoluted and fraught the conflict between
Amafa and farm tenants became, I will use the relocation of Mrs. X as an
example. There are conflicting stories within Amafa regarding her relo-
cation. In the first instance, it is reported that following the death of her
husband, she voluntarily offered to be relocated to her area of origin. The
second interpretation given is that following her husband’s demise, she
wanted to be relocated to the farm Amafa had set aside for relocations. It
is further stated that Mrs. X had signed a binding tenant agreement with
the previous landowner, which prescribed that she and her late husband
would be recognized labor tenants for the duration of their lifetimes.
Prior to vacating her home, Mrs. X was compensated with what was
reported to be an initial payment of R10,000 (Sosibo 2014). On hearing
that her mother had agreed to relocate, conflict ensued between Amafa
and Mrs. X’s daughter. She was not her biological child, she was the
daughter of Mrs. X’s husband by his late wife. Some reports indicate
that at the time of the relocation, the daughter was not living with Mrs.
X. Other reports state that she had returned prior to the relocation of
her mother. Her return led to the suspension of the relocation process
of Mrs. X. However, a further report contradicts both of these accounts.
Here it is claimed that the daughter returned after her mother’s reloca-
tion in order to lay claim to what she believed were her property rights.
She was thus regarded by Amafa to have been illegally occupying her
mother’s former home. Amafa applied for an eviction order—as she was
considered to have no rights following the binding agreement between
her parents and the previous farm owner. This conflict remained unre-
solved for many years because of the standoff between Amafa and other
tenants. The arrest of Mrs. X’s daughter, in a separate incidence, for
the alleged theft of unspecified Amafa property further heightened the
tension. The case study shows how convoluted and toxic the relationship
between Amafa and the tenants became.
In 2002, two years after the protests and with tension becoming
ever more fraught, Amafa asked the SAPS provincial commissioner to
conduct an independent investigation into several illegal activities on the
land they owned at eMakhosini. Among the complaints listed was the
continued illegal hunting in the western part of eMakhosini (allegedly
conducted by, among others, senior police officers) and the threats that
Amafa staff members would be necklaced (the act of forcing petrol-filled
tyres around an individual’s neck before setting it alight). Since neck-
lacing had occurred during the apartheid era, these allegations had to be
taken seriously. Necklacing was an activity that had been predominantly
used against those who were seen to be working against the liberation
efforts during the apartheid era. The fact that the threat of necklacing
against Amafa staff had been made indicated that in the eyes of the local
residents, these government officials continued to be perceived as agents
of suppression. However, besides the seriousness of this alleged intimi-
dation, the recourse to legal battles did not improve Amafa’s position in
the eyes of the local community. Instead, it set the CEO of the organiza-
tion and selected staff members against the Qangqatho Committee. As
a result, the committee argued that they no longer wished to negotiate
with the CEO and the Community Liaison Officer. Rather than dealing
with these middlemen, they wanted to talk directly to the Council of
Amafa.
Ten years after the initial phase of purchasing the Valley’s farms, and
following many protests and tensions between the two ‘warring’ parties,
Amafa began to change its approach. At its Council meeting held on
19 February 2008, the following was decided: all households were to be
provided with: (i) title deeds (which they did not have), (ii) solar panels
or electricity supply, (iii) access to a new communal crèche, (iv) improve-
ments in housing conditions, (v) assistance with relocation, (vi) three
head of cattle for each relocated family, (vii) water and services, (viii)
school transport for a given period after relocation, and (ix) access to
commercial opportunities within the proposed park. In addition, fami-
lies who could potentially be fenced off from the park and would be
allowed to stay in their current residences on condition that they enter
into an agreement with Amafa in which they would not be landowners
but tenants without title deeds.
It is interesting to note that the Council Chairperson was absent
from the meeting held on 19 February 2008. Whether this was
informed by complaints from some community members that the
168 N. Ndlovu
Council Chairperson ran a business entity that was to benefit directly

from the success of the project he led under the Amafa entity, is not
clear. But it was later discovered that this was at the heart of the subse-
quent resignation of Council Chairperson, when he was appointed to
serve on a new Council consolidated by the then Premier, Dr Mkhize. I
further note that among the three Council members tasked with negoti-
ating with the community, two were senior Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP)
members, one of whom served as the Mayor of the Zululand District
Municipality under which the area in question fell (see further discussion
below). After these negotiations, ten families were permitted to remain
inside the perimeters of the park.
Even after this supposedly improved February 2008 offer from Amafa,
the standoff between the organization and the affected community
members did not end. It seems that the intervention by the provin-
cial government in 2012 was to halt relocations. Yet, this did not
prevent Amafa from sending an official letter to the Director General
in the Office of the Premier on 15 August 2012, stipulating yet another
proposal for settling the dispute. This time, Amafa offered to sell the
proposed relocation property that had been refused by the labor tenants
because it was too far away. From the proceeds of this sale, Amafa
proposed that the funds accumulated would be spent on the relocation
expenses, i.e., the provision of houses. This begs a question: since the
offer to provide houses had been made long before the decision to sell
this farm, where were the funds supposed to have come from? My under-
standing of this is that the purchase of the Vaalbank Farm by Amafa had
no cultural significance, but was land identified for relocation purposes,
prior to any consultation with the affected communities.
When the then Premier of KwaZulu-Natal, Dr Zweli Mkhize, inau-
gurated a new Amafa Council in early 2013, following a period during
which the Council had effectively become dysfunctional and meetings
no longer took place, a significant transformation in attempts to resolve
the standoff happened. The new Council unanimously agreed that the
approach applied by Amafa was not successful because of the forced relo-
cation strategies which echoed apartheid policies. In fact, we (I was one
of the Council members appointed for a three-year term of office until
the end of 2015) were shocked at the approach previously applied by the
organization. To move forward, it was decided that the affected commu-

nities had to be engaged with in a more meaningful way that respected
their views and needs. Our view, as the newly appointed Council, was
that there was no other way to resolve this predicament. We thus had
to respectfully engage with the affected families and bring an awareness
of the apartheid laws that had suppressed these citizens into any future
proposed actions. It is telling to note that in almost every communica-
tion Amafa wrote about its conflict with the affected community, they
clearly stipulated their ownership of the land and the rights they had as
the title deed owner. This seems to me a problematic approach, informed
by the view that ‘whatever you want, remember it must be on our terms
since we own the land in question.’ No wonder Amafa failed dismally in
finding a lasting solution for over ten years.
Once we accepted this fundamental shift in approach, we appointed
an eMakhosini Task Team to lead the negotiations. To assist us, we
involved Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife (as biodiversity managers of the park
in question) and government representatives particularly from the Office
of the Premier. In my view, the failure of our Council was not based on
the lack of cooperation from communities, rather there were three things
that prevented us from resolving this crisis: (i) we lacked the authority
to coordinate the implementation of the strategy as a sub-committee of
Council, (ii) involving government officials delayed us because of the
many protocols they had to consider and this made us untrustworthy in
the ‘eyes’ of the community, and (iii) we were influenced by the briefing
we had received from senior executives at Amafa leading us to develop
negative perspectives of the leaders of the Qangqatho Committee. These
three issues had such an impact that we lacked a good strategic direction
for how we were to move from one stage to the next. We simply did not
dedicate enough strategic input and we thus failed when our term ended.
Due to my own involvement in this phase, I shall not discuss this period
further. Its analysis must await input from others.
170 N. Ndlovu
Sustainability and Heritage Management:

Comfortable Neighbors?
Having provided an overview of the tensions that have been ongoing for
over ten years resulting from the disagreement over how and whether
there was a need for communities to relocate to make way for the ambi-
tious eMakhosini Valley project by Amafa, I now wish to address the
issue of sustainability in heritage management. According to Brundtland
(1987), sustainability means actions undertaken must serve the present
while also benefiting future generations. This ideology has informed
dominant approaches to heritage management. I, however, find it prob-
lematic to premise heritage management on the need to maintain
resources as they are for the benefit of future generations. This view
is informed by what I perceive to be the fossilization of heritage thus
not allowing living generations to engage with that heritage in ways
they deem appropriate today. Furthermore, and as I have argued else-
where (Ndlovu 2011), I consider it equally problematic that we premise
heritage management on the idea of benefiting those yet to live in this
world. My view is that the concept of managing heritage for future
generations is Eurocentric, material-centric, and highly problematic. My
argument is that the interests of the living generation must be considered
first, before thinking of those who will live in the future.
The Eurocentric approach which underpins contemporary heritage
management is material-centric, as reflected in the application of terms
such as integrity and authenticity. South African practitioners are starting
to approach heritage management differently. Through interacting with
heritage resources, emphasis is placed on the spiritual significance of the
place and the heritage resources in question. Thus, even if contempo-
rary use required the physical exhaustion of the given heritage resource
this would not be regarded as ‘destruction’ although that is how such
use would be understood within a Eurocentric framework of thinking.
The tension between these two approaches is echoed by several other
researchers (see Pwiti 1996; Ndoro 2001; Ndoro and Pwiti 2001;
Ndlovu 2009a). With this in mind, how appropriate is it to fossilize
heritage and think of these resources primarily in terms of their benefit
for future generations? I am of the view that heritage sites should be
managed principally to ensure their current value(s) and to serve their

contemporary uses as defined by indigenous communities. This means
that for those sites that still have spiritual significance, their manage-
ment should be deeply informed by the approach and concerns of the
communities who relate to the site. With this in mind, there are two
ways in which the current generation can benefit from heritage: (i)
through commercial exploitation of heritage resources and (ii) through
continued use for the purposes deemed appropriate for the relevant
community (i.e., using heritage for ritual ceremonies). The former is,
in my view, always seen from the ‘eyes of the past’ and with ‘eyes of
the future’ dictating management aims. In this context, the ‘eyes of the
present’ are often ignored based on the dominant ideology of sustain-
ability that guides us to look to the future. For example, the interests of
the Duma clan in using Game Pass Shelter, in the uKhahlamba Drakens-
berg Park, for spiritual reasons are grounded in contemporary needs, i.e.,
how can the ritual performances help the living? Thus, the approach to
the management of the site by the Duma clan is grounded in the ‘eyes of
the present,’ which conflicts with the confines within which legislation
promotes heritage management.
Heritage management in South Africa has, besides being rooted in the
globally dominant Eurocentric and material-centric approach, also been
informed by apartheid thinking. The apartheid government’s drive for
segregation involved removing people from localities that were deemed
to be of significance for either cultural or natural heritage. People were
not allowed to reside within locations protected for their biodiversity.
Thus, to ensure sustainability of natural heritage, people had to be ‘taken
out of the equation.’ As a result, this fortress approach has created a
situation whereby heritage managers consider it appropriate to manage
heritage ‘away’ from the people. It is considered problematic to have
people living within localities of what is defined as an important heritage
landscape because of their interference with compliance measures. This
is the main reason why well-known heritage sites in South Africa have
no people living within them—and by living within them I do not
mean as employees (i.e., Robben Island), but as residents in their own
right. Important heritage sites in South Africa are managed within desig-
nated parks that are declared protected areas. It is further telling that
172 N. Ndlovu
all South African World Heritage Sites are under the authority of the
Department of Environmental Affairs that still operates within a simi-
larly outdated framework of thinking. The view that people and heritage
sites are not compatible—the sentiment at the heart of the decision by
Amafa to relocate the affected communities away from the heritage-
rich landscapes of the eMakhosini valley—continues to drive heritage
management across the country today. Noting the paradigm that domi-
nates heritage management in South Africa, politics is another factor to
consider.
The IFP, the ANC, and the ‘Heritage Pawn’

Amafa and the political system of the province cannot be separated.
When the KwaZulu Monuments Council and the National Monuments
Council amalgamated, the strongest of the two (the KwaZulu Monu-
ments Council), ‘emerged victorious’—it dominated the new authority
that was formed in 1997. At that time, the province was still under the
leadership of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a party that had histor-
ically been closely aligned to Amafa. IFP is a South African political
party with roots in the KwaZulu homeland. Its political foundations
were closely aligned with Zulu identity politics. As a result, the party
has been dominant in the former KwaZulu homeland and the KwaZulu-
Natal province post-1994. Considering that the KwaZulu Monuments
Council worked closely with the KwaZulu government, the strong links
between Amafa and the IFP are thus not surprising. In the early 2000s,
Amafa was engaged in discussions to move the institution from the then
Department of Education and Culture to the Office of the Premier.
These discussions were, in my view, informed by the alignment between
Amafa and the IFP. This would have enabled the organization to report
to the highest office of the party in the province. It is noteworthy that
the Amafa Council was dominated for many years by a leadership which
supported the IFP. Interestingly, the former (and longest-serving) leader
of the IFP, Inkosi uMangosuthu Buthelezi, is a son of a Zulu Princess,
Princess Magogo. The Prince has been well known for his support of the
Zulu heritage since the time when he was the Prime Minister for the
KwaZulu homeland, during which the KwaZulu Monuments Council

was established. It is clear, therefore, that the IFP was instrumental in
shaping the then KwaZulu Monuments Council and later, the activities
of Amafa.
Besides IFP members dominating the Amafa Council, other links
which had a significant role in the history of the organization can be
identified. Prince Buthelezi served for many years as the Chair of the
Traditional Leaders in the province. While South Africa has demo-
cratically elected government representatives since 1994, the role of
Traditional Leaders is still prominent within the sphere of governance.
Furthermore, the late Prince Gideon Zulu, one of the former provin-
cial government Ministers, and also previously a senior member of IFP,
was once in charge of the Department of Welfare and Pensions (1994–
2004). On one occasion, Amafa wrote to both these IFP leaders in their
various capacities regarding their challenges around the relocation of the
affected eMakhosini Valley community. While Prince Buthelezi may have
been approached because of his position in the traditional leadership of
the province, I fail to understand why Prince Gideon Zulu would have
been consulted in his government capacity considering the nature of the
department he was heading at the time, and it seems most likely that
Amafa hoped to have access to the influence he commanded in the tradi-
tional leadership of the province, as a member of the Royal family. It is
thus clear that Amafa had the ear of the traditional leadership as well as
the senior leadership of the then ruling party in the province.
What one can also infer from the official letters sent to various
stakeholders is that Amafa had a good relationship with the Nobamba
Traditional Authority (NTA). Considering the political history of the
province, where traditional leaders historically favored an alignment with
the IFP, this is not surprising. I have already highlighted the close links
between Amafa and the IFP; but what is less clear is why the NTA,
which is meant to represent the interests of the local community, never
seemed to have any way of representing the views of their subjects. I
have no record of the NTA ever engaging with the local community
to resolve the conflict over the planned relocations. The intervention
of the NTA would not have had to oppose the proposed project spear-
headed by Amafa, rather, it could have worked to reduce the hostilities
174 N. Ndlovu
that threatened the success of the Amafa project. Interestingly, one of the
Amafa Council members (a former senior member of the IFP but now
a leader of the National Freedom Party) is from the community that
was to be relocated by Amafa. She was identified by Amafa as one of the
three leaders who was to negotiate with the affected community. Consid-
ering the dominant fortress conservation paradigm, which only engages
in ‘box-ticking negotiations,’ it is no surprise that her intervention did
not lead to a positive outcome.
Further highlighting the politicized environment within which the
project was being implemented, it is stated in one of the letters written
by Amafa that the eMakhosini project represents ‘the second such instal-
lation in South Africa’ (Papayya 2009). The letter further states that
the project was initiated by the then KwaZulu-Natal Premier, Sibusiso
Ndebele, a representative of the African National Congress (ANC), to
serve as a ‘tourist drawcard to this remote, but historically-significant
region’ (Papayya 2009). Since 1994, the province had been politically led
by the IFP which had a close relationship with Amafa. This is evident in
the nature of the support that Amafa received for its projects, particularly
those that were focused on Zulu history. For instance, Amafa annu-
ally commemorated the Isandlwana (where the British troops suffered a
significant and previously unknown defeat) and the Rorkes Drift Anglo-
Zulu (1879) battles. Could it be possible that when Premier Ndebele
took over political leadership of the province in 2004 one of his goals
was to use heritage as a political carrot to increase support of the ANC
in uLundi (where the eMakhosini project is geographically located), a
traditional stronghold and power base of the IFP?
The political instrumentalization of heritage by both the IFP and the
ANC has fueled tensions in KZN. Once the ANC became the majority
political party in the KwaZulu-Natal province in 2004, Amafa stopped
commemorating the Anglo-Zulu War as they had done since the days
of their predecessor, the KwaZulu Monuments Council. This ‘step back’
from Zulu heritage could have been informed by the tensions that later
defined the relationship between Amafa and the Office of the Premier,
now under the ANC, which the organization started reporting to in
2004. I will briefly discuss the roots behind the tension below.
Prior to 2009, the relationship between the Office of the Premier

and Amafa had been on a tightrope. First, the Premier instituted an
amendment to the provincial heritage legislation of 1997, leading to a
complaint by Amafa that their views on the draft Heritage Bill which
was promulgated into law 2008 were not adequately considered. Second,
Premier Ndebele suspended the Amafa Council (which was in part
populated by senior IFP members) as well as the CEO in 2009 over
allegations about financial mismanagement in the organization (Maistry
2009; Mdletshe 2009). The IFP responded with dismay at the deci-
sion (Mtshali 2009). However, the then Council Chairperson legally
engaged the Premier, advising him that the Council’s suspension was
illegal according to the KwaZulu-Natal Heritage Act of 2008. The
Premier was soon forced to re-instate all those who had been suspended
(Maistry 2009; Savides and Moolla 2009). Third, and deeply informed
by the stand-off between the two parties, Premier Ndebele established a
Heritage Unit within his office in 2008. This, in my view, was intended
to enable the Premier to have greater control of heritage matters in the
province. As a direct result of the creation of this unit and the amended
provincial heritage legislation, a lot of Amafa’s responsibilities overlapped
with those of the new unit, thus creating the stand-off, with Amafa being
of the view that they reported directly to the Premier, not to a unit
within his office. Considering the amount of overlap in the responsi-
bilities and the role played by this unit in the appointment of Amafa
Council members, the establishment of the Heritage Unit was in my
view a direct challenge to the organization. In recognition of such over-
laps, Senzo Mchunu, KZN Premier from 2013–2016, invited us, as the
Amafa Council, to a meeting during which he presented his intentions
to amalgamate the two governance structures under the umbrella of a
single Research Institute. This idea led to the legal establishment of the
KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and Research Institute following the promulga-
tion of the KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and Research Institute Act in 2018.
The Heritage Unit that was previously in the Office of the Premier has
now been formally amalgamated with Amafa and the new structure was
thus moved into the remit of the Department of Arts and Culture in the
province.
176 N. Ndlovu
Having analyzed the political relationship of Amafa with the IFP, and
the stand-off between the former Premier and the Council of Amafa,
I now return to the eMakhosini project. It is clear that Amafa had no
convincing Resettlement Plan, informed by a thorough Social Impact
Assessment. If these studies had been conducted, it might have been
clear to the organization that relocating the affected communities might
not be ‘best practice’ in post-apartheid South Africa, where things have
to happen differently, sensitive to the fraught political past that we all
share. As mentioned earlier, the provincial government provided funding
for the purchase of land for the eMakhosini project to be realized. They
could have done this for political reasons—to increase political support
for the ANC in the province to topple the IFP. I thus argue that with
their increasing political dominance in the province, it could be that by
the late 2000s the ANC no longer viewed heritage as a significant tool
(in contrast to how they considered it in the late 1990s) to use to widen
its political support in the province. This could be a possible interpreta-
tion of the lack of decisive action taken by the provincial government in
resolving the tension between Amafa and the labor tenants. It is further
possible that a series of rapid successive changes in the provincial lead-
ership is responsible for this delayed intervention. Premier Ndebele was
replaced by Dr Mkhize after the 2009 elections (10 years after the land
had been purchased by Amafa). The latter resigned from his position in
2013 when he took over a top administrative position within the ANC,
soon after appointing the new Council of Amafa. He was replaced by
Premier Senzo Mchunu who himself was removed by the new Provin-
cial Executive Council of the ANC in 2016. His replacement was Willies
Mchunu. Premier Willies Mchunu continued, at a rather slow pace, with
the proposal to amalgamate Amafa and the Heritage Unit. As already
indicated earlier, his efforts culminated in the formal approval of the
heritage bill by the Provincial Legislature, a decision that has since led to
the establishment of the KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and Research Institute.
Conclusion: Resolving the Conundrum

Balancing between the country’s needs for heritage management and
infrastructural development to create employment has proved to be
difficult. On the one hand, heritage managers want sustainable devel-
opment which I argue they often seek to achieve through a fossilization
of heritage. On the other hand, government and developers want to
play a role in the provision of employment opportunities and the long-
term management of our rich heritage resources (Ndlovu 2016). The
two have to meet each other halfway. Heritage managers need to realize
that not every form of heritage is equally important nor does all heritage
need to be preserved for ‘perpetuity.’ Developers need to also appre-
ciate that some of their proposed intentions may need to be amended
due to their negative impact on heritage resources. The eMakhosini
case study used in this chapter clearly highlights the tensions and chal-
lenges regarding the rights of current residents of heritage sites. However,
what is more concerning is that the case study also reveals the effects of
heritage authorities continuing to apply an archaic approach to heritage
management, an approach that does not recognize the compatibility
between people and heritage resources. These archaic approaches are
deeply embedded in the heritage legislation still applied in South Africa.
While colonialism and apartheid may have ended, the heritage legis-
lation passed during the democratic transition has been ‘copy and paste’
in terms of the underlying paradigmatic thinking that informs it. The
politics that guided government decisions previously, particularly during
apartheid, were echoed in the decisions taken by Amafa and its Council
before 2009. Had Amafa and its Council appreciated the history of
forced removals in the country and the need for new approaches to
heritage management, they could have been more successful in their
implementation of the project. True sustainable development cannot be
achieved with forced removals; that can only fail. Their plan, among
other things, introduced ticks which arrived when buffalo were released
onto the land. Even though Amafa refused to accept this to be the case
for many years, it later proved to be true following the large-scale death
of livestock in the area. Therefore, one can conclude that the whole idea
of the heritage park was not well conceptualized in the name of so-called
sustainable heritage development. The price has been too high.
178 N. Ndlovu
Policy Suggestions
1. People need to be integrated into heritage landscapes. There is a
need to shift from the current approach that sees people as a direct
threat to heritage resources. New policies should promote a frame-
work in which people can reside and thrive in the same space
as heritage resources. The notion that people should benefit from
heritage landscapes from ‘outside’ of these spaces must be done away
with.
2. Heritage sites of spiritual significance should be managed differ-
ently from heritage sites that no longer carry spiritual potency. This
will ensure that the current dominant material-centric approaches
to heritage management will be complemented by legislation that
respects local practices. Living heritage must not only be a concept
but must also be realized in practice.
3. While the commercial exploitation of heritage resources cannot be
avoided, such use should be sensitive to local needs. The voices of
‘experts’ should not overshadow local views. Such projects will not be
durable or successful if they are not supported by local people.
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The Antimonies of Heritage: Tradition
and the Work of Weaving in a Ghanaian
Workshop
Niamh Jane Clifford Collard
Weaving and the Complex Entanglements

of Craft, Heritage, and Livelihoods
Drawn from an ethnography of work and learning among kente weavers
in a village workshop in the Ghanaian town of Kpetoe, this chapter
explores the tensions between weaving as a form of work that crucially
underpins the livelihoods of craftspeople and craftwork as a form of
heritage practice. Ghana is famous for its narrow-strip kente weaving,
and the often brightly colored cloths are widely worn at funerals or to
celebrate births, marriages, festivals, as well as being an important part
of chiefly regalia. Among the Ghanaian diaspora and African Ameri-
cans who trace their origins back to this part of West Africa, kente has
also become a powerful and enduring symbol of heritage and cultural
N. J. Clifford Collard (B)

Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London,
London, UK

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_7
182 N. J. Clifford Collard
patrimony, even if international and tourist buyers constitute only a tiny

fraction of the market for kente cloths.
Kpetoe is a rural town that functions as the capital of the Agotime
traditional area in Ghana’s Volta Region, some five hours drive from
the national capital Accra and 100 km inland from the coast. However,
it is best known locally and further afield for its woven kente cloths.
This research is based upon two periods of fieldwork in the village, one
conducted between September 2012 and November 2013, the other
being a shorter visit during May and June 2015. As an apprentice in
the workshop during my initial fieldwork, this space was the focus of the
project and my contacts with local elders, heritage NGOs, and other
members of the local crafting community were negotiated from this
position.
In a context where weaving is ambivalently framed as both the
esteemed ‘work of the community’ and a deadweight of tradition that
offers limited opportunities for young weavers, the values attached to
local heritage and craftwork have become highly contested. Taking the
practices and traditions of weaving as a nexus around which different
social actors, notably young weavers and community elders, negotiate
ideas of heritage and development, this chapter argues that the value
of neither heritage nor tradition is immutable, but rather both are
socially situated, structured, and patterned. In this regard, young weavers
contending with precarious economic conditions, high levels of youth
unemployment and informalized economies have quite different ideas of
heritage than village elders, whose economic positions are often more
secure and whose ties to local and national elites are stronger. The
ethnography looks at the different ways in which heritage and tradi-
tion are configured, highlighting two parallel perspectives. The first is
exemplified by the local annual Agbamevoza festival, a celebration osten-
sibly focusing on the narrow-strip kente cloth which the town’s weavers
are renowned for producing, in which local ideas of heritage and tradi-
tion are performed. The second centers upon the everyday practices
which weavers use to negotiate the opportunities and limitations of their
working lives.
Analysis of Kpetoe’s annual festival suggests some of the ways in
which heritage has been constructed in the intersections between local
The Antimonies of Heritage … 183
politics and the history of the Ghanaian nation-state, with local experi-
ences of modernity and governmentality underpinning the construction
of certain ideas of tradition in Agotime. Attention to the routines
of work, on the other hand, shows how the quotidian and practical
demands of making a living often produce quite different ideas of
heritage. The notion of intangible heritage, and the according of value
not only to crafted products but also to the livelihoods and life-ways
of craftspeople, is important here (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004) and
UNESCO has furthered this agenda, in various guises, since the early
1990s. The Proclamation of the Masterpieces of Intangible Heritage,
instituted in 1997, was an important moment in shifting focus from
objects of heritage to processes of cultural production. However, as this
chapter shows, this paradigm shift has been neither straightforward nor
complete (see Bartolotto 2006). The ethnography put forth here looks
at the limitations of such an approach, arguing that the sustainability of
Agotime’s crafting heritage is crucially bound up with the fostering of
livelihoods and equality of educational and working opportunities for
often marginalized makers. When weavers are unable to live through
their work, the heritage of their craft is put in jeopardy. Fundamental
here is a conception of craft as a process not only of making cloths but
also of forging livelihoods. When looking at Agotime’s weaving festival
and the working cultures of weavers in Kpetoe, two distinct pictures of
heritage emerge, one based on spectacle and thus much more amenable
to heritage discourses, the other more routine and unremarked upon but
nonetheless essential to the crafting of local cloths.
It is with both of these perspectives in mind that those engaged with
heritage matters in African contexts must ensure that policies effecting
craftworkers take account of the challenges that makers face forging
livelihoods, and work to actively support them in seeking out dignified
and meaningful lives. Bringing together these strands, the chapter seeks
to further a view of heritage and development that prioritizes the posi-
tive contribution crafting can make to local livelihoods and lifeworlds,
rather than viewing heritage and tradition solely in terms dictated by
elite actors. Failure to balance the spectacle of tradition with intangible
heritage and the everyday needs of weavers, risks turning heritage into a
weighty burden upon those already contending with precarity.
Heritage, Development, and the Elite

in a Ghanaian Festival
Instituted in 1995 at the behest of current paramount chief Nene Nuer
Keteku III and marked annually in September, the Agbamevoza is a
week-long festival celebrating traditions of cloth production in Agotime,
a community of thirty-seven towns and villages on either side of the
southern reaches of the Ghana-Togo border. The festival is comprised of
historical re-enactment, a kente weaving competition, firing of musketry
and a ‘Women and Children’s Durbar’ that seeks to reframe female initi-
ation rites from a heritage perspective. Celebrations culminate on the
last Saturday of the festival, in a Grand Durbar held at the Ghanaian
Customs and Excise Preventive Service parade ground in Kpetoe. The
Durbar is an elaborate spectacle, commonly composed of a public
procession of local leaders that concludes with a formal reception where
high profile guests are entertained, and the political power of local elites
is enacted and legitimized (see Umar-Buratai 2012). Enmeshed with
the historic encounter between extant traditions and British colonial
incursions across the region, the Durbar as a form of heritage prac-
tice is most closely associated with the Emirates of Northern Nigeria,
but continues to form an integral part of festivals across Anglophone
West Africa (Apter 2005: 167–199). Considering the crucial impor-
tance of claims to tradition in festivals across Ghana (Lentz 2001: 54),
the Agbamevoza authenticates itself through displays of weaving. The
craftsmen with whom I worked described weaving as the ‘traditional
work of the community,’ despite it being just one form of labor that they
had to balance against driving, farming, and professional work in their
attempts to forge sustainable livelihoods. Historical re-enactment and
rowdy displays of musketry fire from local Asafo 1 groups also played a
part in forging an authentic sense of local heritage, linking contemporary
festival practices with the public performance of Agotime history. The
festival’s success in forging a spectacular and performative kind of local
heritage was evident in its popularity among young weavers in Kpetoe
and its capacity to draw the Agotime diaspora back home, bringing
families together in celebration.
Nonetheless, the picture of heritage put forth in the festival is crucially

bound up with the perspective of select elite actors. Proud of his title as
‘guardian of Ewe kente’2 the Agotime paramount, like traditional leaders
and chiefs across Ghana, positions himself as an important intermediary
through which ‘true’ knowledge of Agotime heritage can be accessed (see
Yarrow 2011). These claims are bolstered by the fact that he has written
several lengthy accounts of Agotime history and has collaborated with
UNESCO on projects documenting the history and practice of kente
weaving in Agotime. It can be argued that the paramount’s position as
a gatekeeper of local knowledge works to fulfill his aspirations to recog-
nition as both a skilled craftsman and chief. In this way, the form that
the festival has taken has emerged from astute political calculations on
the part of the paramount and his entourage as to how local practices
can most convincingly be put to work not only in performing cultural
heritage, but also in accruing elite prestige. One particularly telling
instance of these negotiations is the way in which, having originated in
the 1980s as a triumphalist celebration of Agotime’s military endeavors
against the Asante, the festival has come to focus instead on weaving and
the history of craftwork in Agotime. In the run-up to the celebrations,
demand for kente produced by local weavers increases and participants
in the festivities routinely don their finest cloths when attending events.
However, alongside other more established festival practices, recent inno-
vations in the festival’s form include a weavers’ palanquin 3 procession
through the Grand Durbar and a youth weaving competition.
These shifts are important when considering that local leaders have
legitimated not only their power, but also their particular view of
heritage through aligning themselves with the dominant cultural forms
of ‘outsiders’ who have greater access to resources (Mosse 2005: 218).
In the case of Agotime’s festival, this has meant eschewing militarized
history in order to garner the support of the Regional House of Chiefs,
who provide financial resources and much sought-after recognition to
celebrations that ‘…promote interethnic exchange and development’
(Lentz 2001: 54). Thus, local elders and festival organizers have tacti-
cally deployed craftwork, rather than military history, as the focus of the
celebration, with weaving becoming a legitimate fulcrum around which
both, local pride can be expressed, and outside support garnered.
This work of cultural negotiation has been executed by the paramount

and his chiefly colleagues with great diplomacy and skill, and their
profound knowledge of local history and craft practices is undoubted.
Nonetheless, Nene Keteku’s position as a gatekeeper can be seen to
undermine other views of local heritage, particularly those of workshop
members who spoke with guarded bitterness of their marginalization in
the process of organizing the festival, and their distrust of local leaders.
Although the event was eagerly anticipated by young workshop weavers
as a chance to market their wares and socialize with friends and family,
many of their views on the festival were not actively sought by the orga-
nizing committee. Even those elements of the festival, like the weaving
competition and loom-palanquin (see Fig. 1) that were meant to repre-
sent the local crafting community were organized in conjunction with
a local NGO rather than the weaving workshop members themselves.
Fig. 1 Kente weaving competition winner being carried through the durbar
ground on the loom palanquin, Agbamevoza festival, Kpetoe, September 2013
(Photo credit: Niamh Clifford Collard 2013)
Rather, dismissed by certain local elders as ‘thieves,’ oriented toward

money rather than tradition, many young craftsmen are judged by their
elders to fall short in terms of both their technical skill in the loom and
their knowledge of the craft’s history and lore. Despite emerging from
experiences of modernity, when ideas of tradition and heritage func-
tioned as impracticably high standards against which young craftsmen
often fell short, these discourses worked to powerfully exclude some
craftspeople from the everyday advantages of a ‘modern’ life (Herzfeld
2004: 20). Those struggling to make a living in the craft came to occupy
precarious social spaces of ‘waithood.’ For these young men, difficulties
accessing education and decently recompensed work have meant that all-
important social markers of adulthood, including the resources to marry
and support a family, are becoming ever-harder to attain (see Honwana
2012). As such, attitudes toward heritage very much depended upon
one’s position within local hierarchies, and contestation was particularly
centered upon the tension between weaving’s intrinsic value as a cultural
practice and the everyday demands made of weavers trying to market a
product.
This process is bound up with both modernity, where the integration
of mobile technologies and media into the everyday lives of young people
around the world has broadened their horizons (see Honwana 2012: see
also Jua 2010), and the ever-quickening pace of globalization, which
increasingly imperils artisans’ livelihoods as crafted products have been
largely overtaken by mass-produced goods (Scrase 2003: 449; see also
Herzfeld 2004). As has been persuasively argued elsewhere, ideas about
heritage are crucially tied to experiences of (and indeed against) glob-
alization (see Herzfeld 2004). What is more, the intersection between
globalization and heritage issues fundamentally alters ‘…how people
understand their culture and themselves’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004:
58). In one sense, this is evinced by the integration of media and tech-
nology into how the festival is celebrated. Social media and messaging
services, including Facebook and WhatsApp, play an increasingly impor-
tant part in the dissemination of information about and images of the
festivities through social networks of kin and friends. Local radio and
print media also play a role in the promotion of the festival. However, on
another level this relationship was evident in the dissonance between the
lavish presentation of local heritage put forth during the celebrations and
the challenging reality of young weavers contending with deep-rooted
social inequalities and economic precarity. For them, a festival focused on
the technicolor spectacle of chiefly processions rather than the viability
of craftwork and livelihoods was failing to address the everyday needs of
weavers.
This is not to say that heritage in Agotime was divorced from broader
political and social currents. Indeed, with coverage from local and
national media, as well as an increasing social media presence, the festival
formed part of widely circulated images of Ghanaian and West African
culture. However, to the extent that the festival functioned as an arena
within which the local elite could forge and strengthen their ties both
to politicians and NGOs, these exchanges could be exclusive and exclu-
sionary. An organizing committee composed of the paramount chief,
local business owners, and other local ‘big men’ is tasked each year with
inviting guests of honor, and the presence of MPs, government ministers,
and NGO officials forms an important part of the celebrations. However,
the workshop weavers whose craft sits at the heart of the celebration,
were notably absent and effectively excluded from this committee. Thus,
the festival constitutes a nexus between local and national elites, offering
politicians an opportunity to connect with their constituents and giving
the local elite a legitimate forum within which demands for resources
and support for development projects can be made, while simultaneously
reinforcing social hierarchies which marginalize young craftspeople (see
Lentz 2001). The performative offering of cash donations during the
course of the Grand Durbar, along with the ritualized displays of respect
through chiefly processions and greetings, sees prestige accrue on both
sides. In this way, the political and material aspirations of both chiefly
and political leaders become wedded to the exclusive forms of heritage
on display in the festival.
However, these displays and their efficacy in forging relationships
between local and national leaders do little to allay a fundamental lack
of trust weavers have in their representatives, both elected and tradi-
tional. In conversation with workshop colleagues, it was not uncommon
for talk to turn to local development projects that remained incomplete.
During the summer of 2013, a long-promised road linking the Kpetoe’s
main thoroughfare to the town’s market and the villages in the hinter-
land beyond remained unfinished. With the festival on the horizon, one
weaver complained that although the local MP and district assembly had
pledged the community this road several years before, work had ground
to a stand-still. He wondered what might be said by officials about the
matter during the upcoming celebrations and lamented what he viewed
as the corruption of community leaders. These exchanges were a frank
expression of the fundamental divorce between the aspirations of crafts-
people and those of elites, with ideas of heritage doing little to bridge
this gap.
History, Policy, and the Creation of Local

Heritage in Agotime
As a nexus around which the relations between various elite actors are
negotiated, the forms of culture on display at the festival, along with the
heritage discourses at work in Agotime more broadly, are underpinned by
the Ghanaian state’s cultural policy. These in turn are linked to a series of
longstanding international debates across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond
about the social, economic, and cultural value of patrimony and the
precarious status of heritage in post-colonial contexts (UNESCO 1972;
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004; Senah 2013). In a crucial sense, from the
colonial period, through the liberation struggles headed by Nkrumah in
the 1940s and 50s and up until the present moment, ideas of the ‘nation’
in Ghana have been constructed in relation to the political and social
authority embedded in localized forms of heritage.
During the colonial era, the powerful symbolism of chieftainship,
kente cloths, and the cultural festivals enacted through Durbar displays,
along with other emblems of supposedly ‘local’ traditions were put to
work in shoring up the power of chiefly elites reconfigured by the
colonial authorities. Across the African continent, invented traditions
introduced by European colonizers in African colonies tended to focus
on governance and subordination, rather than production (Ranger 1983:
228; see also Umar-Buratai 2012). As such, throughout much of the
Britain’s colonial history in the former Gold Coast,4 when their involve-
ment was largely limited to coastal enclaves, a policy of indirect rule
was fundamental to governance in the colony. These policies worked
to ‘traditionalise’ chiefs and cement along monarchical lines a hith-
erto heterogeneous array of disparate political formations and practices
(Ranger 1983: 211–212). The policy, which was instituted in all of
Britain’s West African colonies, put traditions of chieftaincy to work
supporting the political and economic exigencies of the colonial admin-
istration. Thus, the institution of chieftaincy, so central to contemporary
notions of tradition across Africa, was to a considerable degree born from
a colonial history of subordination and control. From this perspective,
the loose association drawn in the Agotime workshop between heritage
issues and the often conservative concerns of a local chiefly elite can be
seen as fundamentally rooted in the political history of the region.
Andrew Apter’s work interestingly examines the intertwining of local-
ized forms of culture and processes of state formation in cultural festivals
(Apter 2005: 167–169). As an invented tradition that has its origins
in the British colonial administration of India, and was introduced to
West Africa by General Lugard,5 Apter (ibid.) highlights the role that
the Durbar played in Anglophone colonial West Africa, including the
former Gold Coast. Just as colonial authorities across West Africa worked
to reconfigure local power-structures into chiefly elites who would be
more amenable to their governance (Wilson 1987: 494), so too they
instituted cultural practices that consecrated these new chiefs. Thus, it is
little surprise that in Agotime, as elsewhere across southern Ghana, the
paramount chief and his entourage are often at the heart of festival cele-
brations. The Durbar is a ubiquitous feature of Ghanaian festivals and
these performances, rooted as they are in the exercise of colonial power,
continue to play a role in defining the relations between state power and
local culture.
In the period since independence these forms of culture have been re-
purposed and, not without awkwardness, married to a vision of national
unity. The state-sponsored notion of ‘Unity in Diversity’—a slogan
commonly broadcast through the radio and plastered on hoardings
across Ghana—espouses values of democracy, tolerance, and equality,
while highlighting the tensions inherent to a nationalism that rests upon
diffuse, and often conflicting, local identities. A short excerpt from the
policy document of the National Commission on Culture quite clearly
lays out the issues at stake:
Ghana has over 50 ethnic groups whose common values and institutions
represent our collective national heritage. Each of these ethnic groups
brought together by accident of history, has unique cultural features and
traditions that give identity, self-respect and pride to the people. Since
independence, the emerging civil society of Ghana has recognised the
need to promote unity within this cultural diversity, and Ghana has
since enjoyed relative unity, stability and peace…The Fourth Republican
Constitution (1992) recognises culture as a necessary tool for national
integration and development… (National Commission on Culture 2004:
7–8)
Although this cultural work has not been restricted to Ghana alone,
having historically found its echoes across sub-Saharan Africa in Leopold
Senghor’s Senegalese negritude and Mobutu’s Congolese ‘African authen-
ticity,’ these sister movements have similarly struggled in their attempts
to forge national sentiment from disparate local traditions. The very idea
then of ‘local’ heritage, was arguably born out of the internecine strug-
gles of modernity for power and identity in a region riven by colonial
and post-colonial fault-lines. While not totally discredited, for pride in
local heritage in a place like Agotime remains and is evinced in events
such as the Agbamevoza, ideas of local heritage have not emerged from
these struggles unscathed. Rather, the politics of heritage and nationalism
carries with it the heavy baggage of a project which, due to its internal
contradictions, was not, and may never be, fully realized.
‘Local’ heritage, the Ghanaian nation and the power of chiefly and
political elites make the sorts of cultural practice on display in events
like the Agbamevoza hegemonic ones, representing largely elite concerns
rather than the everyday issues faced by many weavers. Nonetheless, this
is not to say that heritage and powerful ideas of community and iden-
tity did not play a key role in the lives of Agotime weavers. Rather, the
importance of cultural practices for young craftspeople lay more in the
routines of their work, sociality and other elements of what might be
termed intangible heritage, rather than in the spectacle of the festival.
Arguably, it is in these practices of sociality, and the lifeworlds that they

sustained within the crafting community, that a great deal of Agotime’s
crafting heritage is vested (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004: 61).
Community and the Social Grounding

of Weaving Heritage
The everyday practices of sociality that patterned life in the work-
shop and the experience of weaving in Agotime were the unremarked
upon basis of workshop weavers’ festival celebrations. Weavers valued
the festival not only as a spectacular display of local power, but also
as an opportunity to market their cloths and a chance to join together
in strengthening and broadening the social networks of family, friends,
and customers that underpinned their livelihoods. In the run-up to the
Agbamevoza in September 2013, a group of workshop colleagues came
together to set up a stall at the Grand Durbar selling their cloths.
Weaving was a skill that was most often learnt in the context of the
work of the household, with fathers, uncles, older brothers, and neigh-
bors teaching younger family and friends how to work at the loom.
Thus, the cloth stall at the festival had been organized by male cousins
who teamed up with neighbors and friends to sell their wares. Beau-
tiful cloths in rainbow hues were carefully displayed under a canopy the
weavers had rented together, and each man took the chance to show off
their skillfully made pieces. Potential customers were courted with smiles
and welcoming handshakes and the weavers themselves modeled care-
fully woven and stitched batakari (smocks made up of stitched together
cotton strips that are widely worn across Ghana but are nonetheless
considered typical of the north of the country) like those they had on
sale. The men shared responsibility for looking after the stall, taking
turns as they alternated between selling cloth and exploring the Durbar
grounds. Photos of the jubilant crowds and the palanquin processions
were snapped on mobile phones, and the families and friends of the
weavers stopped by the stall to chat and share snacks of fruit, maize,
and ice cream.
For Francis, an accomplished workshop weaver and one of my friends

and mentors in the crafting community, the Agbamevoza was a chance
to sell cloths and develop relationships with new customers, while also
participating in the life of the village, learning about Agotime’s heritage
and sharing this knowledge with his child. Describing the festival,
Francis said:
For me, myself, I like to see those things so I will know how to tell a
story about it to my son or somebody [else, and] I have been planning
to take [my son] to go and watch everything, see everything! (2016)
Much like weaving knowledge itself, which was socially situated and
crafted between family and friends in community spaces like the Kpetoe
workshop (see Lave and Wenger 1991), heritage was articulated as much
in the relationships that weavers had with one another, their families and
the broader community, as in the spectacle of the Durbar.
Craft Learning and Intangible Heritage

Looking at craft learning and the shared knowledge of festival practices as
instances of intangible heritage in the weaving community it is clear that
both were structured around exchange. Both at the festival and in the
workshop, weavers shared stories, food and social contacts as they navi-
gated the routine demands of their work and its place within the broader
context of Agotime’s crafting heritage. Just as my colleagues’ stall at the
Agbamevoza had been characterized by the pleasures of weavers sharing
food, meeting friends and taking part in the festivities, so too was the
weaving workshop a place where weavers worked together to share ideas,
develop their craft practice, and showcase their skills. The steady rhythm
of work at the loom was punctuated by discussions about how best to
use materials or which combinations of shape and color would be most
aesthetically pleasing. Trusted colleagues shared work with one another
and established workshop members would offer guidance to younger
weavers. As an apprentice myself, I often benefitted from the input of
experienced craftsmen sharing their expertise and tools with me, as we
spoke over some food or a drink. These exchanges occasionally became

quite raucous, participants putting forth and defending strong opinions
about how best to approach the making of a cloth.
Apart from the practical problem-solving part of these conversations,
they also served as a focus for the negotiation of social norms in the
workshop. Certain kinds of behavior were often reinforced in these
exchanges, particularly those surrounding cleanliness and order. I was
often reminded of the importance of sweeping my loom before the start
of work, and there were tacit links drawn between the maintenance of
a clean loom and control of the spiritual hazards of weaving work. One
friend went as far as to admonish me for repeatedly forgetting to clean
my loom, saying that by ensuring that the space where I worked was
swept, I would be ridding it of possibly malignant spirits. While rites
associated with weaving in Agotime were not an obviously common-
place part of the everyday routines of craftwork, habits such as these were
nonetheless embedded within the wider cosmological and cultural ideas
that constitute intangible heritage (for further discussion of the intersec-
tion between the routine and ritual practices of work, see Dilley’s 1987
account of Senegalese Tukolor weavers).
The offering of libations and the sharing of food to mark the begin-
ning and end of apprenticeship was another practice which similarly
brought together sociality, work and ‘intangible’ cultural ideas. Small
celebrations, during which weavers, their families and friends came
together to mark and legitimate the training and skill of new members of
the crafting community, these gatherings were low-key affairs that lacked
the pomp and ceremony of the festival. Nonetheless, the part they played
in the socialization of weavers was significant, importantly underpin-
ning how craft learning and practice was transmitted and sustained in
Agotime.
Conclusion: Imperiled Livelihoods

and the Role of Heritage
In the summer of 2015, I returned to the Kpetoe workshop to visit
friends and see how things had changed since completing my initial field-
work at the end of 2013. Despite maintaining contact with two of my
former mentors, I was saddened to find the workshop, which had once
been home to nearly thirty weavers, a much quieter place. A core of
about ten weavers remained in the workshop. However, a number of
others had abandoned the loom for work elsewhere, focusing instead on
cultivating their family farms, finding work as drivers or on furthering
their education in the hope of maybe securing an elusive government
job. Those who remained spoke dispiritedly of the challenges they faced
in making ends meet. The ongoing Ebola crisis, which began in 2014,
was widely felt to have had a negative impact on the viability of work-
shop livelihoods. Although no cases of the disease had been reported in
Ghana, several workshop members were sure that the humanitarian crisis
ongoing in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea had dented the local tourist
trade, with visitors postponing travel to the region, causing a knock-on
effect to their trade-in cloth. They spoke eloquently about the ways that
media coverage of events had stoked fears that travel to Ghana was a risk
many tourists were not prepared to take. As someone who had followed
reporting of the epidemic from London, I could only agree with them
that news of the disease had indeed created palpable, if not also very
problematic, fear of contagion. Furthermore, the Ghanaian government
had called in the IMF toward the end of 2014, and agreement on a
package of loans and austerity measures at the start of 2015 heralded a
worsening domestic economy. Taken together, these crises were felt to
have chipped away at the sustainability of life in the workshop, whose
membership had more than halved in the three years since I first arrived
in Kpetoe.
Reflecting upon these changes, and the daily challenges weavers faced
supporting themselves and their families from the craft, it was clear that
macro-economic, political, and social factors far beyond the control of
Agotime’s weavers have long challenged their livelihoods. In moments of
crisis, the viability of crafting livelihoods was acutely affected, pushing
many weavers from the loom into other types of work which they hoped
would offer a modicum of security, but which were also often just as
insecure. Driving Okado, which involved offering pillion rides on the
back of rented motorcycles, was just one example of the precarious work
that some young craftsmen took part in when weaving jobs were in short
supply. Plying potholed roads for passengers was not only dangerous, but
also far from lucrative, with drivers having to cover both the price of fuel
and the rent of the bike from their limited earnings. Those remaining
in the workshop were left to negotiate these challenges with the limited
social and material resources available. Social ties with kin and customers
were carefully cultivated and maintained, while resourceful and inven-
tive use of materials played a part in producing desirable and marketable
cloths (see Clifford Collard 2016).
However, while the material and social fabric of weavers working lives
was under constant strain, the spectacle of heritage on display in the
festival achieved little in securing sustainable livelihoods for craftspeople.
The gap between hegemonic, elite forms of festival heritage and the
cultural routines that constitute craft-working is not necessarily, in and of
itself, a negative thing. In one sense, it is evidence of the ways that culture
is socially patterned and structured. What is, however, undeniable, is
that the disjuncture between festival heritage and the routine practices
of weaving as a form of heritage work that underpins crafting liveli-
hoods, highlights the differing values attached to heritage by members
of various elites and kente weavers themselves. For weavers, craftwork
was approached pragmatically as an everyday means of making a living,
while for elite actors the festival was an occasion to accrue prestige and
bolster their position within social hierarchies. Although these prerog-
atives might not always be in direct opposition, they seemed to rarely
intersect, with resultant tensions and disagreements between different
actors about what constituted heritage in the crafting community. In
a situation where young weavers are struggling to sustain their liveli-
hoods in the face of deep-seated systemic and globalized inequalities,
their voices about what heritage should be, and the pressing priorities
of getting by through craftwork, were often marginalized in favor of a
view of heritage that favored spectacle over the pressing, quotidian needs
of craftspeople for dignified and rewarding work.
Policy Suggestions
The kind of elision highlighted above is not primarily a question of
academic debate, but rather has very real ramifications for people whose
work is bound up with important ideas of culture and tradition and who
are also living with precarity. It is arguably the work of heritage offi-
cials to try and reconcile the appeal of festival heritage with alternate
views of crafting heritage that foreground the aspirations of weavers to
dignified, sustainable, and meaningful forms of work. To these ends, it is
hoped that this ethnography will encourage those engaged with matters
of heritage, sustainability, and policy to:
1. Pay attention to how issues of heritage, tradition, and culture are

socially stratified and structured, both locally and in wider, more
global terms;
2. Consider how amenable heritage discourses and practices are to the
everyday challenges of making a living;
3. Remember that heritage must be valued not only in terms of ‘tangible’
displays of culture, but also for the positive contribution it makes to
livelihoods and communities. In this sense, heritage should be seen as
crucially embedded in the shifting, mutable routines of the everyday
rather than just as a form of cultural spectacle.
Notes
1. During periods of Akwamu and Asante expansionism in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, Asafo companies played an important role in military
resistance east of the Volta and their inclusion in contemporary festivals
makes important claims to local history.
2. Although Agotime history is distinct from that of their more populous Ewe
neighbors, and older members of the community speak Agotime Dangbe,
rather than Ewe as their mother tongue, Ewe is the most widely spoken
language in the area and Agotime is widely seen as ‘…a kind of proxy Ewe
[culture]’ (Nugent 2008: 948).
3. Palanquins are decorated chairs, borne aloft by several carriers that are gener-
ally used for the ceremonial transport of chiefs at durbar celebrations in
southern Ghana. A weavers’ palanquin featuring a weaver working at a loom

is a novel interpretation of this tradition.
4. The Gold Coast was formed in 1867 by the British government seizure of
private lands along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea. As a British colony,
it continued to be known as the Gold Coast, the British claiming further
territory through the Anglo-Ashanti wars that ended in 1902. Following
independence in 1957, the territory was renamed Ghana after the ancient
empire that lay to the north-west of the current Ghanaian state.
5. General Lugard was a British colonial officer to Nigeria at the time of the
1900 surrender of the Royal Niger Company to the British crown (Apter
2005: 179–180).
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Transformation as Development: Southern
Africa Perspectives on Capacity Building
and Heritage
Rachel King, Charles Arthur, and Sam Challis
#HeritageMustFall
Development, capacity building, and heritage have become familiar
bedfellows over the last few decades, particularly in post-colonial
contexts. Together, they invoke myriad definitions, institutional arenas,
actors, and practical permutations grounded in the central tenet that
heritage can become a workhorse for positive social and economic
change. In South Africa after democratization in 1994, the initial view
We dedicate this chapter to Rethabile ‘Captain’ Mokhachane, first and most experienced
of the Field Technicians who went from Moshebi’s in 2009, to Field Director on the
Sehlabathebe UNESCO project in 2015 and Foreman at PGS Heritage in 2018. Departed
before his time, in 2020. Re ea o leboha ka ho sebetsa ka thata le rona, re bohloko ka
linako tsohle tseo obileng le tsona tse thata bophelong.
R. King (B)
Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, UK
e-mail: tcrnrki@ucl.ac.uk
C. Arthur
Hereford, UK

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_8
202 R. King et al.
of heritage as a platform for multicultural reconciliation swiftly gave way

to neoliberal, government-led empowerment projects delivered by an
array of parastatal, non-governmental, and civil society agencies (Weiss
2014b: 124). Concurrently, development (in its various interventionist
and immanent incarnations) became increasingly distributed among
state, private, voluntary, and NGO spheres, and yoked to heritage on
the basis that cultural rights and self-determination are development
concerns (Coombe and Weiss 2015). Consequently, both South Africa
and Lesotho have witnessed increasing promises of social and economic
capacitation, and demands for popular participation in heritage manage-
ment. These have come via networks of heritage practitioners and institu-
tions in each nation—Lesotho being independent but highly sensitive to
its neighbor’s economic and intellectual trends. We say ‘demands’ because
within many recent forms of public archaeology participatory develop-
ment is prescribed in such a way that it becomes an obligation rather
than a choice, with responsibility for the ‘failures’ of such projects placed
in whole or in part on community partners (Henry 2004: 140; Dawdy
2009; cf. Pogge 2002; Englund 2008).
In addition to the obvious tension between neoliberal empower-
ment agendas and the pitfalls (even ‘tyranny,’ Cooke and Kothari 2001)
of participatory development (Žižek 2004: 178–179; González-Ruibal
2009: 114–115), the picture of capacity building and heritage manage-
ment in southern Africa is further complicated by long-standing calls
from heritage managers that their practice reform itself to become more
relevant, inclusive, and sensitive to the needs of its contemporary polit-
ical contexts (Shepherd 2002b; Ndlovu 2009; Pikirayi 2015). Over the
past decade, the southern African archaeological community has called
for parity in access to archaeology as a discipline and profession, which
should be undertaken at the academic and commercial institutional
level. This movement, dubbed ‘transformation’ in contemporary political
S. Challis
Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg,
South Africa
e-mail: sam.challis@wits.ac.za
Transformation as Development: Southern Africa … 203
rhetoric and adopted by the Association of Southern African Profes-

sional Archaeologists (ASAPA) in 2008 to cover the Southern African
Development Community (SADC) bloc (ASAPA 2008), has empha-
sized equal access and representation as a quantitative measure (i.e.,
increasing the numbers of non-white and non-male archaeologists). This
is in line with the recent (as of 2015) national trend holding transforma-
tion synonymous with numbers-based affirmative action projects (Reddy
2008: 219). In contrast to reformative projects elsewhere in African
archaeology (e.g., Stump 2010, 2013; Lane 2011, 2015; Davies 2012),
transformation treats the imperative for inclusivity primarily as a socioe-
conomic argument rather than an epistemological one: the concern is
that ‘archaeology should provide practical benefits for society in general’
(Stump 2013: 269), with an emphasis on ‘practical’ and ‘practice’ that
implicates institutions such as universities, museums, and the commer-
cial sector as potential sites of economic empowerment. Transformation
in archaeology, then, is aligned with a particular facet of development in
southern Africa: the long-standing struggle—enshrined in South Africa’s
constitution—for redistributive socioeconomic rights delivered through
non-governmental and parastatal programs specifically geared toward
capacity building and, ultimately, job creation (Weiss 2014a).
Following comments by Innocent Pikirayi (response in Stump 2013),
archaeology as a discipline has more at stake in this struggle than the
emphasis on numerical and financial equality suggests. At issue is the
degree to which transformation of African archaeology into a more
socially representative discipline is about achieving relevance (intellectu-
ally and socioeconomically) or, going further, restitution for archaeology’s
often violent and racist past in Africa (e.g., Shepherd 2002a; Hall 2005).
For Pikirayi in southern Africa, archaeology will become indigenous and
representative only when the discipline and its methods (not merely
its trowels, Shepherd 2003b) are accessible to non-white archaeologists.
These calls for redress of colonial or apartheid-era wrongs embedded
in the transformation conversation suggest that at least in southern
Africa, increasing participation in archaeology alone may be insufficient
to address the social imperatives placed on the discipline (cf. Ndlovu and
Smith 2019). The pervasive sentiment that the colonial past and its mate-
rial evocations must work to redeem themselves or be declared moribund
204 R. King et al.
is nowhere more evident than in South Africa’s Rhodes Must Fall move-
ment: this campaign’s assertions that legacies of colonial monumentality
embody alienation from state and educational institutions have garnered
national and international attention.
Conversations concerning transformation address how themes of
rights and neoliberalism articulate with networks of expertise, institu-
tions, and publics active on multiple scales. As such they constitute fertile
ground for investigating how different social, practical, and epistemolog-
ical resources are called upon to address the insistence that heritage is,
in itself, a resource for socioeconomic change (Coombe and Weiss 2015:
43). Here we focus on the experiences of heritage practitioners navigating
the imperatives, demands, and potentials of capacity building agendas
in southern Africa. In particular, we are interested in how struggles
for socioeconomic rights, under the twinned projects of transforma-
tion and development, are being expressed in the practice of heritage
management.
Taking these linkages between capacity building, rights, and resti-
tution as its point of departure, this chapter examines what happens
when archaeological practice engages with the demands of transforma-
tion, with attention to how these engagements play out in the field.
The significance of the trowel’s edge as a site of knowledge production
is well-established (e.g., Lucas 2001; Berggren and Hodder 2003), as
is the educational potential of the archaeological process (e.g., Holtorf
2009). Here we focus on the intersection of knowledge production and
skills transfer with concerns over livelihoods and the role of heritage in
development.
We write from the perspective of two projects (Fig. 1): the Metolong
Cultural Resource Management (MCRM) Project, a four-year heritage
mitigation program associated with western Lesotho’s Metolong Dam
and funded by the World Bank and the British Government (Arthur and
Mitchell 2010; Mitchell and Arthur 2010); and the Matatiele Archae-
ology and Rock Art (MARA) Programme, a nine-year South African
National Research Foundation-funded scheme combining a training
agenda with rock art survey and excavation in the Matatiele region of the
Eastern Cape Province (once largely within the apartheid-era Transkei
Fig. 1 Map showing the locations of the MCRM Project and the MARA
Programme (Figure created using ArcGIS® software by Esri. ArcGIS® and
ArcMap™ are the intellectual property of Esri and are used herein under license
[Copyright © Esri. All rights reserved])
Homeland, e.g., Challis 2018). Looking to Lesotho and a former Home-

land or ‘Bantustan’1 one is confronted by the demand for an archaeology
that acknowledges the imperative of both job creation and engaged over-
seeing of heritage management (King and Arthur 2014). Here, we probe
where archaeological capacity building projects—with their potentials
for failure and disillusionment—intersect with broader ideas about social
transformation.
206 R. King et al.
We argue that conceiving of heritage as an economic workhorse regu-

larly does more harm than good for the project of transformation.
Expectations of heritage as a socioeconomic driver—and particularly as
a platform for capacity building—generally work against the creation
of local authority. We submit that this is a consequence of a broadly
superficial coupling of transformation and heritage that neglects impli-
cations for systemic change, as well as the expectations of heritage that
capacity building projects create. The projects discussed here (and several
others throughout the sub-continent) were designed to mitigate or avoid
processes that reproduce (and thereby underscore) divisions between
experts and capacitated technicians. Despite notable successes, these were
ultimately stymied by limitations within the infrastructure of heritage
management at the state, academic, and commercial levels.
In this regard, our work resonates with James Ferguson’s (1994)
seminal observations that development discourse obfuscates or obstructs
local political processes. In his groundbreaking analysis of ‘development
discourse’ related to dams and rural livelihoods in Lesotho, Ferguson
demonstrates how ‘development’ as both a problematic and an appa-
ratus performs two seemingly contradictory yet devastating functions.
Where it defines poverty as a technical problem with a technical solution,
‘development’ explicitly de-politicizes poverty. Masked by this polit-
ical neutrality, the apparatus of development—and the array of state
and non-state actors implicated therein—can facilitate the expansion of
state power under the banner of a ‘technical mission’ addressing rural
economic capacitation (Ferguson 1994: 256). To this invocation we add
Sarah Radcliffe’s (2006: 233) argument that where development thinking
appropriates heritage as market-oriented, this implicates a mosaic of
arenas, actors, and expectations that influence how people use heritage to
position themselves relative to modernity and its socioeconomic entail-
ments (cf. Ferguson 1999: 13–14). We disarticulate received narratives of
transformation, community engagement, and development, and identify
tensions and concerns that emerge from the practical corollaries of these
narratives. Specifically, we highlight issues surrounding credentialing of
trainees, knowledge production and the creation of expert/technician
divisions, and recommend policies for the southern African heritage
sector to address these.
Changing Spaces
ASAPA adopted its Transformation Charter in 2008, drawing heavily
on South Africa’s constitution in its attempt to address institutionally
entrenched disparities between white and non-white archaeologists. The
Charter advocates for actively recruiting students from diverse racial
and economic backgrounds, and promoting equal access to employment
and participation in all archaeological sectors (ASAPA 2008). It is these
last two points regarding employment and participation (Section 4.2
and 4.3, respectively, of the Charter) that concern us here. While
ASAPA’s Charter is addressed to the entire SADC bloc, aspects reflect
uniquely South African concerns, many of which pre-date democrati-
zation in 1994. These include archaeology’s role in education (Smith
1983; Mazel and Stewart 1987), popular culture (Hall 1995), university
attendance (Maggs 1998), and the problems of an African past written
by non-Africans (Hall 1984). Post-1994, South African archaeologists
advocated for incorporating archaeology into primary and secondary
school curricula (Esterhuysen 2000), revised university curricula to elimi-
nate discussions of race and foreground public history (Shepherd 2003a:
841), and launched public outreach initiatives to encourage previously
disenfranchised communities to participate in archaeological practice
and study (e.g., Parkington 1999; Esterhuysen 2000). Archaeologists
such as Nick Shepherd (2002a: 76–77) argued for a post-colonial South
African archaeology that took an active role in projects of restitu-
tion, social justice, and memory. This resonated with long-standing
calls for African post-colonial archaeologies accounting for subaltern
perspectives and redressing the wrongs of colonialism (e.g., Schmidt
1995; Stahl 2001). Encouraged by the advent of a national educa-
tional system premised in experiential and multi-disciplinary learning,
archaeologists led public and participatory projects that engaged previ-
ously disenfranchised communities in the process of writing history
‘from below.’ This encouraged students to explore the discipline at
secondary and tertiary levels (King 2012). Academic empowerment of
under-represented constituencies in archaeology was eventually codified
in the Transformation Charter (Smith 2009) but within the past decade
this project has been heavily influenced by ‘market-based imperatives,’
208 R. King et al.
meaning that students are increasingly equipped to function in a sector

where heritage significance is ‘measured against economic and political
priorities’ (Esterhuysen 2012: 10).
Alongside and occasionally intersecting with these developments,
throughout the 1990s and 2000s, South Africa saw a profusion of
projects run through both non-governmental and government-sponsored
agencies aimed at coupling archaeological skills transfer (including exca-
vation, site management, and tour guiding) with revenue creation, often
through tourism ventures. The underlying principle in the majority
of these projects was either to capitalize upon an existing sense of
cultural ownership or to instill such a sense in certain communities,
thus illustrating the financial and symbolic value of their heritage.
Within most of these projects, capacity building was a local solution
for a local problem (pace Lafrenz Samuels 2009). Custodianship was
devolved to program participants in the expectations that both heritage
and its stakeholders would become self-sustaining and profit-making (cf.
Coombe 2009: 397). Unfortunately, the disappointments or ‘unfulfilled
promises’ (Chirikure et al. 2010) derived from such programs outnumber
the sustainable success stories (Duval and Smith 2013). Tourism-based
projects in southern Africa have rarely become self-sustaining and where
they have, it is on the strength of natural rather than cultural assets
(Meskell 2009). Attrition of trained personnel has been high when the
programs to which trainees were affiliated cannot pay salaries. Where
training was site- or project-specific, these individuals were forced to seek
work outside the heritage sector. Where heritage and its custodians fail
to deliver on the promises of development, the relevance of this heritage
and its connection to ‘good citizenship’ implied at the project’s outset is
often called into question (Meskell 2011).
For our purposes, it is useful to consider the situation of archae-
ology in Lesotho and how this differs from its neighbor. Since the early
twentieth century, archaeological projects in Lesotho have been carried
out almost exclusively by foreigners from foreign institutions (Mitchell
1992). Development of domestic heritage capacity was not a major
priority as it was in South Africa. With the exception of the two-year
Analysis Rock Art Lesotho Project run by Lucas Smits (1983) through
the National University of Lesotho, which trained Taole Tesele as one
of the first Basotho archaeologists, and despite the best efforts of the
few individuals at the Government of Lesotho’s Preservation and Protec-
tion Commission (superseded by the Department of Culture in the
Ministry of Tourism, Environment, and Culture), there was no effec-
tive heritage management infrastructure—including sufficient personnel
and regulatory bodies to enforce existing legislation.
In the interim, archaeology in Lesotho was carried out largely through
contracts connected to natural resource extraction projects. In 1986,
the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) began construction of
the first of five dams designed to generate revenue for Lesotho. The
project was marked by severe underinvestment in archaeological miti-
gation (Mitchell 2005). Several surveys and excavations were commis-
sioned by the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority as part of
the LHWP scheme (Lewis-Williams and Thorp 1989; Mitchell and
Parkington 1990) and by the Lesotho Ministry of Works ahead of the
construction of the Southern Perimeter Road (Parkington et al. 1987;
Mitchell et al. 1994), but archaeological investment has largely been
restricted by contract limits and expectations. While LHWP supported
the creation of the heritage center at Liphofung Cave (associated with
Katse Dam) as a cultural tourism initiative to support local communities,
the emphasis here was on revenue creation through tour guiding using a
prescribed textual description of the site rather than archaeological skills
transfer (Scudder 2005: 116). We argue that more sustained, far-reaching
changes are necessary to transform Lesotho’s heritage management infras-
tructure. The MCRM Project was the first instance in Lesotho where
capacity building for heritage management was specifically built into a
mitigation program.
Despite the promising adoption of heritage legislation in Lesotho
(the National Heritage Resources Act of 2011), the lax enforcement
of this law has meant that a job market has yet to develop. This is
especially worrying given the impact that extractive resource projects
have on cultural resources and the imperative for involvement of local
heritage specialists. LHWP faced heavy media and academic criticism
for its failure to adequately mitigate the loss of tangible and intan-
gible heritage accompanying the construction of the Katse and Mohale
Dams, as well as the trauma that dam-affected communities felt when
they were resettled (Thabane 2000; Mwangi 2007; Hitchcock 2015).
210 R. King et al.
While the MCRM Project was an effort to remedy this state of affairs
(see below and Arthur et al. 2011), and the provision of four years of
further employment for MCRM trainees at Polihali Dam by the CRM
consultancy PGS Heritage (www.pgsheritage.com) is an extremely posi-
tive sign, the extent to which specific capacity building programs or
intangible heritage mitigation measures have been implemented in the
current Phase II of the LHWP is, as yet, unclear (Arthur et al. 2011;
King and Arthur 2014: 171).
Of Experts and Empowerment

Rather than rehearsing these struggles and disappointments (for this, see
Arthur et al. 2011 and King and Arthur 2014), our aim is to draw
attention to facets of capacity building that bear further scrutiny. The
drive to incorporate participatory perspectives in archaeological knowl-
edge production is a familiar one in Africa (e.g., Schmidt 2005, 2011;
Chirikure and Pwiti 2008; Jopela 2011), but here we are concerned with
where this intersects with the imperatives of livelihoods that transfor-
mation and capacitation-as-development position themselves to address.
The question of how to build capacity demands that we engage with
the question of what work we want heritage to do, to the extent that
this devolves to the choices made by individual actors or clusters of
actors. This then prompts a further question: Is capacity building in these
contexts aimed at equipping individuals with a widely applicable skillset,
producing archaeologists, or training heritage managers? Put another
way, what are the ramifications of creating situations where individuals
are deliberately enmeshed in heritage regimes with a mandate to make
heritage pay?
The immediate and perhaps obvious answer to this last question is
a loss of faith in heritage where it fails to live up to expectations of
its ability to deliver progress and modernization. If we take seriously
Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu’s (2012) position that South African archaeology
is not ‘citizen friendly’ in its inability to sustain modern livelihoods,
then the aporia engendered through the disappointments of heritage as
an economic driver becomes dangerous. In Ndlovu’s formulation, the
failure of heritage to address socioeconomic redistribution has dimin-

ished its effectiveness as a development instrument, to the point where
extractive development such as mines that actually damage heritage land-
scapes are preferable. Indeed, two days prior to this chapter’s (initial)
completion it was announced that the South African Department of
Mineral Resources overruled the heritage preservation laws protecting the
National Monument site of Canteen Kopje in favor of allowing diamond
mining, the argument being that the mine better serves the cause of
economic empowerment than the archaeological site (see www.canteenko
pje.com).
While Ndlovu’s focus is largely on the shortcomings of heritage
as a discipline and marketable product, our own work is concerned
primarily with heritage as process in a capacity building context. Both
the MCRM Project and MARA Programme were designed such that
their research components and training for heritage management were
mutually reinforcing. The MCRM Project’s efforts toward developing
skills and promoting jobs have been described in detail elsewhere, as
has the Project’s organization and implementation (Arthur et al. 2011:
240–241; King and Arthur 2014). Briefly, beginning in October 2009
and lasting 14 months, five professional archaeologists mentored an
initial team of four trainees from the Metolong area who had expressed
interest in participating in the Project. Employing a modified version
of the Museum of London Archaeology Service’s (MoLAS 1994) single-
context recording system, trainees and professional archaeologists shared
responsibility for the consistent, easily accessible formula of excavation
procedures (extending to sorting and sieving stations) and interpretation.
Over the course of six months, trainees were given increasing respon-
sibilities until they could conduct test excavations unsupervised and
mentor a new group of trainees. Trainees were also given responsibility
for coordinating community engagement efforts, including organizing
and attending school visits and community meetings in the surrounding
area (Sesotho, pl., lipitso). Primary and secondary schools within the
Metolong Catchment were invited to visit the excavation, where they
were given tours and participated in mock excavations. Combined with
an open-site policy whereby visitors were encouraged to observe the exca-
vations, local trainees were able to assert themselves as authorities on
212 R. King et al.
the archaeological process (Arthur and Mitchell 2012). Following the

completion of the MCRM Project, four trainees have found employ-
ment on archaeological and cultural resource management (CRM)
projects elsewhere in Lesotho and South Africa (see below), and one
has gone on to complete honors and master’s programs in archaeology
at the University of the Witwatersrand (Mokoena 2015; Challis 2018).
Trainees-turned-technicians have organized themselves into the Lesotho
Heritage Network (LHN, lesothoheritage.wordpress.com), an indepen-
dent co-operative advocacy group for Lesotho’s heritage and heritage
professionals.
Following the ethos of the MCRM Project, the MARA Programme
implemented similar strategies on the South African side of the border,
employing a mandate that explicitly coupled research and transformation
(e.g., Challis 2018).2 In keeping with its central mission of redressing
the lack of historical and archaeological attention given to the Matatiele
region of the former ‘Transkei,’ it follows that archaeological practice
should also redress the way communities are engaged in knowledge
production and skills transfer. Since its inception in February 2011,
MARA has been run in collaboration with the Mehloding Commu-
nity Trust (www.mehloding.co.za), a local organization certified in Fair
Trade tourism that operates hiking tours through the southern Maloti-
Drakensberg Mountains. This partnership is not with Mehloding as a
tourism venture but rather as a community institution and resource base
for field stations, potential personnel, and local Indigenous Knowledge.
Mehloding recruits participants in MARA’s training program, which
utilizes Mehloding’s payment structures in compliance with Fair Trade
practice. The training program itself tracks closely with that developed
at Metolong, largely because mentors and some trainees were previously
part of the MCRM Project. Two of the more senior alumni of the
MCRM Project joined MARA and took responsibility for instructing
junior trainees, all under the supervision and instruction of professional
CRM archaeologists whose contracts specified that their duties included
excavation and training. Excavations are published with field technicians
as co-authors (Pinto et al. 2018). At MARA the training program empha-
sized both excavation and rock art survey and recording, the latter being
such a vast task that trainees are equipped to carry on surveying inde-
pendently once the full MARA team returns to its base in Johannesburg
(Challis 2018).
A specific aim of both the MCRM Project and MARA training
programs was to mitigate power relations within many field projects
where often a single individual or small group is responsible for creative
thought (Berggren and Hodder 2003), with a second tier of diggers
afforded some limited decision-making responsibilities at the trowel’s
edge, and below them a typically untrained group of ‘sorters.’ In
Africa, these ‘unskilled’ jobs are typically undertaken by local commu-
nity members. The adaptation of the MoLAS (1994) system to take in
the sorting and sieving stations was designed to extend interpretative
participation to these jobs.
This is not to say that either project was free from conflict surrounding
the implications of producing expertise and how this translates into liveli-
hoods. While the MCRM Project and its training program enjoyed a
broad remit and resource base, the limitations attached to virtually all
developer-led archaeological endeavors constrained the sustainability and
replicability of the program in several major ways. These included a fixed
timeframe for the project, a budget in which training was only a small
part, and the ultimate need for the client (the Government of Lesotho)
to be amenable to making capacity building a priority in the develop-
ment agenda. Further and more seriously, while the training program
equipped a handful of Basotho heritage professionals with an adequate
skillset, Lesotho’s heritage industry did not receive a similar boost and
therefore a fully fledged employment sector for these trainees has yet to
emerge.
More specifically and turning to the inner workings of the projects
themselves, MARA struggled to ensure steady and reliable cash flow
from a university research system that is unaccustomed to paying salaries
through research projects (though this improved once contract work
began—see below). The short-term, seasonal element of research field-
work rendered any employment opportunities that it generated tempo-
rary. This has, however, been mitigated to some degree by the contiguity
of field seasons generated by projects within the LHN. One of the
major struggles (and even fault lines) within the MCRM Project training
214 R. King et al.
program was devising and adhering to pay scales and a promotional

structure. The responsibilities, hierarchical position, and reflective wage
differences attached to trainees of different levels became of increasing
concern during the course of the program and, owing to lack of guide-
lines or precedent, was something we had not fully appreciated (King
and Arthur 2014: 172). Related to this was the question that trainees
asked with greater regularity as the program progressed: At what point
are people transformed from trainees to heritage managers? While this
could refer to and be resolved by the arbitrary creation of titles and
ranks, this question speaks to the larger preoccupation of the techni-
cian/expert divide that has dogged concerns over knowledge production
and authority in archaeological field contexts worldwide (Lucas 2001).
Relevant here is Laurajane Smith’s (2004: 2–3) observation that
archaeological attention legitimizes or de-legitimizes views of culture,
especially in CRM. That capacity building programs endow heritage
management and managers with this legitimizing power is taken as
a ‘Good Thing’ in transformation rhetoric. Yet here it is important
to examine the structural limitations of empowerment and how these
interact with the work that heritage is being asked to do in a mitiga-
tion context such as Metolong. Inasmuch as the goal of the training
program at Metolong was to create both technical and interpretative
capacity, the nature of contract archaeology (particularly in internation-
ally funded development work) is that the agenda is necessarily set by
a few senior investigators, officials, and developers (cf. Kankpeyeng and
DeCorse 2004; Arazi 2009; MacEachern 2010). The terms of mitiga-
tion and salvage are therefore, and to varying degrees depending on the
developer-archaeologist relationship, out of the hands of trainees and
thus some sort of expert/trainee divide remains.
That said, two highlights came with the awarding of contracts to
members of the LHN: the baseline archaeological surveys at Polihali
(Pinto 2014) and the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Sehlabathebe
National Park (Challis et al. 2015). Working through the University
of the Witwatersrand, under the aegis of the MARA Programme, the
two most experienced technicians, Ntate Rethabile Mokhachane and
Ntate Puseletso Lecheko, were made Field Directors for the UNESCO
project—shouldering the burden of data acquisition and remunerated
in accordance with responsibilities. The report writing and negotiation

of survey parameters and recommendations, however, were negotiated
between the MARA Principal Investigator and the Ministry of Tourism,
Environment and Culture.
The legitimization conferred through capacity building programs is,
therefore, perhaps not undermined but at least qualified: the authority
for salvage, and for determining what is worth saving, rests with the
professional archaeologists and developers who are amalgamated under
the general heading of ‘authority.’ Nowhere is this illustrated more
clearly than by graffiti drawn in the scar left by the rock art removal
component of the MCRM Project’s mitigation program. This involved
Basotho as community liaisons and rock art specialists but was never-
theless closely associated with the ‘makhooa ka Metolong,’ or ‘white
people of Metolong’ (Fig. 2). Because MARA’s academic research focus
means that the program is not tied to a developer agenda it has not
experienced these divides as strongly. However, the short-term and some-
what sporadic nature of fieldwork discussed above illustrates the fragility
of the authority conferred to trainees by MARA’s (and any) capacity
building program, where capacitated heritage managers are dependent
upon interventions by Principal Investigators to make their expertise pay.
We offer policy suggestions for remedying this situation in this chapter’s
conclusion.
For the present, it is important to note that these authoritative
tensions are not wholly the result of flaws within the training programs
themselves: we have described our confusions and shortcomings else-
where (King and Arthur 2014), but examining how these training
programs fit into the larger transformation and development landscape
leads us to conclude that a major restriction on any particular capacity
building endeavor related to heritage management is that it inevitably
confronts a lack of parallel systemic and institutional change. This means
that once heritage managers complete training programs they find the
path to educational and commercial opportunities blocked by a lack of
measures for accrediting and assessing their skillset, and as a result, they
cannot make their capacity pay outside of the specific local contexts in
which they were trained. Following Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels (2009: 83),
216 R. King et al.
Fig. 2 Photograph of graffiti at the ARAL 254 rock art site (Photo credit:
Luíseach Nic Eoin)
poverty and development failures become territorialized while authority

and transformation rhetoric are the purview of cosmopolitan experts.
This is a situation that has repeated itself in participatory develop-
ment projects worldwide (e.g., Hickey and Mohan 2004; cf. Moore
2001; Englund 2006: 101–103), and so it is not surprising that the
same dynamic appears in a heritage management context. It is, however,
particularly pernicious in South Africa because of the overwhelming
popular dissatisfaction with the inability of heritage to deliver on its post-

1994 promises of socioeconomic redistribution, political unification,
and cultural healing (Meskell 2011). That transformation in heritage
management has had more rhetorical than tangible impact thus far not
only increases the potential for this dissatisfaction and an accompanying
dis-enchantment with heritage, but also emphasizes the divide between
heritage elites and those who remain ‘un-transformed.’ This schism is
possibly even starker in Lesotho, where (with a handful of exceptions)
archaeology and heritage management have been almost entirely tied to
development and conducted by foreigners.
Heritage Works
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the strictures and struc-
tures of archaeological expertise and the development framework that it
references have an unbreakable stranglehold on the authority of heritage
managers. Recent literature (Coombe and Weiss 2015) on the globaliza-
tion of heritage and development has illustrated that heritage regimes
are not hegemonic, top-down affairs in which value is instituted by
a paramount authority. They are, rather, shifting networks of actors
whose desires, agency, and authority operate on varying spatial scales.
Despite the institutional frustrations that capacity building in both the
MCRM Project and MARA Programme have experienced, where these
training programs have addressed themselves to trainees’ involvement in
alternative or vernacular interpretations of heritage we see potential for
changing the terms under which culture and development are coupled,
at least at ground level.
The incorporation of living heritage assessments in mitigation
programs both at Metolong and elsewhere permits space for perspec-
tives on heritage management and mitigation that are not necessarily
based in the compensatory or loss-driven value of cultural assets (King
and Nic Eoin 2014; Kleinitz and Merlo 2014). By ‘living heritage’, we
mean intersections of practice, memory, and (crucially) material culture
that express themselves in the quotidian present with reference to the
past (Nic Eoin and King 2013; see also Harrison 2013: 18, 204–205).
218 R. King et al.
Through these assessments, Basotho and foreign heritage managers were

able to draw out local preoccupations with, for instance, changes in
plant resource procurement and use (including medicinal, ritual, and
subsistence purposes), access to pasturage, and the symbiotic relation-
ship between grazing and the maintenance of abandoned villages (Nic
Eoin and King 2013; King and Arthur 2014: 174–177; cf. Siteleki
2014). These associations demonstrate not only that heritage is linked
to livelihoods in ways that development-led mitigation schemes often
do not account for, but also impacted how communities perceive, value,
and mitigate the significance of these linkages through particular and
often unexpected strategies. For example, plant availability is negotiated
through household or village herbaria, grazing patterns are reconfigured
along with a total re-imagining of the Metolong landscape (including
the re-location of several supernatural snakes that had hitherto dwelt in
large pools in the river, Snow 2011), and the significance of abandoned
villages inheres in their continued use for building materials and grazing
area rather than their preservation (King et al. 2014; King and Nic Eoin
2014; cf. Daly et al. 2016). As heritage is enacted and embodied in
practice, it includes a range of economic, mnemonic, material, and oblig-
atory relationships that do not fit neatly into development or market
frameworks (King and Nic Eoin 2014; cf. Englund 2008). Capacitated
heritage managers are crucial to identifying and contextualizing these
perspectives, as long as ‘capacity’ involves engaging with the conceptual
apparatuses of heritage as much as if not more than training to preserve
and salvage its material components.
In the case of the MARA Programme, given that this was the first
systematic engagement with the archaeology of the Matatiele region,
the training program was seen as a way to begin this engagement as a
dialogue between community members and academics. Consequently,
MARA’s participants (academics and trainees alike) were able to nego-
tiate contradictions between various conceptions of heritage and how
they should be experienced and managed. For instance, while MARA’s
primary focus is rock art survey (resonating with the national emphasis
on rock art as marketable heritage, e.g., Duval and Smith 2013), the
overwhelming sentiment in Matatiele itself is that the area’s definitive
heritage is represented by its pre-eminence as a hub for Nguni and Sotho
initiation schools (Mokoena 2015, 2017; Zulu 2016). Referring to a

heavily ritualized coming-of-age process, men’s and women’s initiation
schools demand seclusion and often take place in painted rock shelters,
where activities can damage rock paintings and archaeological deposits.
This sort of conflict in heritage management is not new in southern
Africa (e.g., Ndlovu 2011). The crucial point for MARA is that the
training program in combination with the focus on living heritage and
ethnography created a space to debate these issues and acknowledge the
legitimacy of trainees’ authority. That said, recent ethnographic research
(Mokoena 2015, 2017; Zulu 2016) directs attention to widespread
sentiment that initiation schools are actually a locally driven and region-
ally specific form of marketable heritage, targeting a broad audience of
Basotho and South African aspiring initiands wishing to avail them-
selves of expertise in Matatiele. This point and its potential comparison
with more ‘top-down’ ideas of heritage tourism await further in-depth
exploration.
These observations refer us back to Sarah Radcliffe’s (2006: 233) thesis
above that, in development contexts, culture is invoked in various facili-
ties (from marketable product, to institution, to creative entity), which in
turn generate expectations, obligations, and relationships among actors.
We are not suggesting that the expertise of individuals trained through
capacity building programs is necessarily founded upon their expertise in
localized forms of living heritage. Rather, we draw attention to the exam-
ples just described in order to hint at the potential for participants in
capacity building programs to change the terms, or at least the immediate
context, of how heritage is conceived and constituted. Rock art can be
changed from product to an aspect of cultural institutions such as initi-
ation. Preservation can be redefined once associations between material
culture, landscape, and livelihood are revised. These are possibilities that
demand further exploration in future work but for the moment demon-
strate the outcomes of capacity building that include explicit engagement
with the values, forms, and force of heritage—that is, its politically and
epistemically persuasive power (Lafrenz Samuels 2015). Engagements
that, in other words, take seriously ‘non-expert’ agency in outlining a
role for heritage in development.
220 R. King et al.
Transforming Topographies of Power

The foregoing has illustrated how interrogating the bundling of capacity,
development, and socioeconomic empowerment under the heading of
transformation too often becomes dis-empowering. In seeking to address
calls for transformation in heritage management, the MCRM Project and
MARA Programme (representing CRM and academic projects, respec-
tively) were confronted with the shallow or highly localized engagements
of transformation as a development instrument. Despite aspirations of
mobilizing heritage for socioeconomic empowerment (via skills transfer)
and restitution (via a new multi-vocality), the absence of institutional
means for acknowledging the authority thus created means that capaci-
tated people (and their expertise) remain conditional and territorialized.
This leads us to the first of our policy recommendations: the
need for a credentialing system that acknowledges the outcomes of
capacity building programs and the place of their alumni in profes-
sional heritage management structures (cf. Ndlovu 2014: 205). This
is a measure to be undertaken by the heritage management commu-
nity which, in southern Africa, is represented by ASAPA and the South
African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) as national regulatory
body. As mentioned above, ASAPA’s constitution contains a provision
bringing ‘field technicians’—implying those heritage managers with a
field-based skillset—under their aegis. The clearest established course of
action for this is for technicians to avail themselves of the ‘archaeology
management’ qualifications framework, which consists of a nation-
ally standardized course and examination administered by the South
African Qualifications Authority (SAQA). ASAPA is now recognized by
SAQA, which requires that ASAPA and its affiliated institutions such
as universities coordinate, administer, and assess the qualifying frame-
works course being examined (C. Namono, personal communication).
This is a daunting path upon which to embark, both because of the
bureaucracy involved and the resources (human and infrastructural) that
it necessitates. Moreover, introducing new credentialing pathways for
field-trained individuals would re-shape the landscape of professional
heritage management in southern Africa, prompting reconsideration
of what constitutes adequate and necessary qualifications and intro-

ducing competition into an already crowded industry—outcomes that
may trouble some members of ASAPA’s CRM wing. Whether or not
SAHRA would take such qualifications seriously is a separate issue. At
the moment, membership in a professional organization is not compul-
sory to practice CRM in South Africa, or submit official reports in
compliance with heritage legislation to SAHRA, and thus there is little
incentive from the regulatory (and by extension, the commercial) sector
for individuals to enroll in a SAQA-type course.
Ultimately, the issue of credentialing speaks to two overriding
concerns about institutional recognition of field technicians: recogni-
tion within a community of heritage practitioners and colleagues, and
the commitment of SAHRA to establishing and upholding standards for
heritage management in line with professional best-practices and quali-
fications. Adopting a standardized evaluation system like SAQA would
be a significant step toward actualizing the tenets of ASAPA’s Transfor-
mation Charter, although it would not resolve all of the most pervasive
concerns about capacity building outcomes and may create others. Of
particular concern for us is where achieving SAQA certification at the
level of Principal Investigator necessitates a post-graduate degree, which
not only retains the ceiling that forecloses career mobility for field
technicians but makes it explicit and codified. We therefore support
instituting a credentialing scheme that will enable heritage managers
trained in capacity building programs to obtain recognition from their
peers, apply for work and eventually contracts in heritage manage-
ment, and—importantly—pursue educational opportunities rather than
making educational shortcomings a barrier to career development.
To be clear, we are not suggesting this approach specifically as a means
of recruiting diversity within the discipline of archaeology, but rather
directly addressing the relevance of archaeology and heritage manage-
ment in the contexts in which they operate. The training programs
described here are aimed at providing a skillset applicable across a range
of fields. The sort of accreditation that we envisage would provide formal
recognition of this skillset for the purposes of finding related employ-
ment. Our aim here is not to lay out a pathway to transforming heritage
management as a profession, but for practically and directly engaging
with the expectations that capacity building produces.
222 R. King et al.
This relates to our second policy suggestion, which is that where

capacity building forms part of heritage management it includes a
component that permits space for debating the value, aims, and context
of the heritage in question. We have noted elsewhere that especially in
CRM contexts it is necessary to explore alternative (and perhaps more
workable) conceptions of heritage in order to create methodologies that
best address the sociocultural and economic impacts of mitigation prac-
tices (King and Arthur 2014: 176–177). Here, we direct attention to the
observations made above that where training programs include compo-
nents in which trainees engage with underlying assumptions about what
heritage is and does (especially its practical corollaries), this carries the
potential for re-visiting and revising the terms under which culture is
implicated in development projects. Living heritage, ethnographic, and
oral historical enquiries are the most readily apparent avenues for such
exploration. Excavation and survey programs can also be designed to
encourage a critical engagement with the definition of heritage (e.g.,
Gavua and Apoh 2010; Kleinitz and Merlo 2014).
Finally, and re-iterating points made elsewhere (Arthur et al. 2011:
241; Arthur and Mitchell 2012: 7; King and Arthur 2014: 179), we
recommend the abolition of unskilled labor on archaeological exca-
vations in southern Africa. It has been argued convincingly that the
distinction between technicians and archaeologists is more imagined
than it is real (Berggren and Hodder 2003), and the failure to rectify
the expert/technician divide that emerges through encouraging unskilled
or un-credentialed labor has a tremendous bearing on livelihoods in
southern Africa, as these schemes limit opportunities for education and
secure employment.
At the outset of this chapter, we described the networks of exper-
tise, government, and civil society mobilized by the linked concepts of
development, heritage, and capacity building; in closing we emphasize
the structure of this arrangement, namely that it should be conceived
as a network rather than a hierarchy of authority (cf. Ferguson 2006:
91–93). Recent suggestions that archaeologists and heritage managers
‘put their house in order’ refer to the question of accountability when
development agendas—which we take as including transformation—set
the stakes for heritage (Chirikure 2014: 218; cf. Ndlovu 2012, 2014).
Where heritage professionals position themselves between developers and

local stakeholders in a hierarchical structure, conflicts of interest emerge
and result in socioeconomic disenfranchisement. We argue that heritage
managers (including trainees) should locate themselves and their exper-
tise within a more horizontal topography of power (pace Ferguson 2006:
93), considering where their authority impacts on other nodes in this
network and where they can set (or change) the terms under which
heritage and development are coupled.
Policy Suggestions
1. The establishment (either within ASAPA or another body) of a
vocational credentialing system for archaeological technicians whose
skillset is the product of field-based capacity building programs as
a pathway to employment and further education or credentialing
within professional archaeology.
2. Where capacity building programs are deployed as part of a heritage
management or development program, these should include avenues
for participants to engage in the process of creating management
strategies and communicating these to stakeholder publics.
3. The abolition of unskilled labor on archaeological excavations in
southern Africa via measures adopted by ASAPA and other profes-
sional bodies.
Acknowledgements We are grateful to the volume editors for the invita-

tion to publish this paper. An earlier version of this chapter was presented at
the conference ‘African Heritage Challenges’ at the University of Cambridge
in May 2015; we thank the convenors and participants for their valuable
comments. The projects described here were made possible through generous
funding from the World Bank, the British Government, St Hugh’s College
(University of Oxford), and the South African National Research Foundation’s
African Origins Platform. We thank Mark McGranaghan, Peter Mitchell, and
Luíseach Nic Eoin for their support and feedback on drafts of this paper.
Finally, our greatest thanks go to those who participated in and led the
MCRM Project and MARA Programme, especially Will Archer, Wesley Flear,
Iris Guillemard, Kiah Johnson, Puseletso Lecheko, Tsepo Lesholu, Mduduzi
224 R. King et al.
Maseko, Rethabile Mokhachane, Lisedi Mokhantso Nthabiseng Mokoena,

Sheriff Mothopeng, Alice Mullen, Nkosinathi Ndaba, Bongani Ndenge,
Pulane Nthunya, Hugo Pinto, James Pugin, Rae Regensberg, Joseph Ralimpe,
Brent Sinclair-Thomson, Mncedisi Siteleki, Nomsa Situ, Thabathane Tshaka,
Stephen van den Heever, Len van Schalkwyk, David Witelson, and John Zulu.
We thank also the traditional leaders with whose permission we work, most
notably Paramount Chief, the late Jerry Dipuoa Moshoeshoe, Chief Kutloano
Richard Letuka, Chief Tiisetso Lepheana and his son Jobo Lepheana, Chief
John Nkau, the late Chief (Nkosazana) Nonkulileko Sphambo and Chief
Sobantu Sphambo.
Notes
1. ‘Homeland’ or ‘Bantustan’ refers to a system of reserves for non-whites laid
out by the Bantu Authorities Act in 1951 and in effect for most of the
remaining tenure of the apartheid era. Primarily concerned with consol-
idating and controlling movement of non-white communities through
carefully maintained and modified ‘traditional’ institutions, the multiple
legacies of Bantustans can be mapped onto areas of rural poverty and under-
developed infrastructure in today’s South Africa (see, e.g., Beinart 2001:
162–163, 218–227).
2. Details available at marasurvey.wix.com.
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African States and the Transnational
Development Agenda
The Culture Bank in West Africa: Cultural
Heritage and Sustainable Development
Mathilde Leloup
A Socio-History of Culture Banks in West

Africa
The Culture Bank model, created in 1997 in a small Malian village called
Fombori (in the Douentza administrative district), is composed of three
structures: a museum which collects cultural heritage artifacts belonging
to inhabitants of the related village, a micro-credit bank which provides
grants to the owners of these artifacts, and a training center which
trains the beneficiaries of the micro-credit grants on the development
The paper relies on data collected through observation and interviews for my Master’s thesis
which was later published as a book. See Les Banques Culturelles, Penser la redéfinition du
développement par l’Art (Leloup 2016).
M. Leloup (B)
Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR)/
Associated to the Center for International Studies (CERI),
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: MATHILDE.LELOUP@sciencespo.fr

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_9
236 M. Leloup
of ‘income-generating activities.’ This model sought to create interde-

pendence between local development and cultural heritage protection.
It intended to protect cultural heritage from illicit trafficking, espe-
cially in rural areas—through the creation of a museum, which would
exhibit cultural artifacts and ‘lend’ them to their owners for rituals.
It also aimed at initiating a process of sustainable and local develop-
ment—through micro-credit grants given in exchange for these items.
The model intended to benefit the whole community—through the
training center. Originally, this model was the result of the failure of
two former models: a women’s cooperative and a community museum,
coupled with a micro-credit bank. In 1993, Aissata Ongoiba, an inhabi-
tant of Fombori, attended a craft fair in a neighboring village and decided
to duplicate this model in her own village to attract tourists. Shortly after
this first experience, a second group of women from Fombori tried to
reproduce the idea. In the midst of these rival groups, members of the
Peacecorps and the NGO Gestion Aménagement du Territoire created
a community museum with a craft store. In 1996, this museum went
bankrupt as the Fombori inhabitants were reluctant to deposit their arti-
facts and only a trickle of tourists visited (Keita 2007: 118). Learning
from this double failure, another Peacecorps member, Todd Crosby,
sought to bridge the gap between the craft cooperative and the commu-
nity museum models and the needs in Fombori. By introducing the idea
of compensation, the initiator of the Culture Bank model took advan-
tage of the failures of two former projects to better respond to local
expectations (Deubel 2003: 31).
Recognized by the Development Marketplace of the World Bank in
2002 (World Bank 2002a) and funded by the discretionary fund of
James Wolfensohn in 2003 (Jerry Dell former consultant WBI/CESI,
personal communication, 18 April 2014), the Culture Bank model was
labeled a success story in the ‘Fight against Poverty’ campaign of the
1990s. These two funds allowed the creation of two additional Culture
Banks in Mali: one in Kola (Bougouni administrative district) and
another in Degnekoro (Dioïla administrative district) in 2004 (Dell
2004). Thanks to the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and the School of African Heritage (EPA) in Benin, the Culture Bank
model has since been diffused from Mali to Koutammakou in Togo and
The Culture Bank in West Africa: Cultural Heritage … 237
Tanéka in Benin, to create a network of experts to further the ‘preven-

tive conservation’ mission of ICCROM (the International Centre for the
Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property). The
Culture Bank model is used today as an example of the articulation
between culture and development in the UN Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs), and between Cultural Heritage and UN Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) in the post-2015 Sustainable Development
Agenda (UNGA 2013) (Fig. 1).
The aim of this chapter is to question the manner in which connec-
tions can be made between development—which refers to the future and
to progress—and the protection of cultural heritage—which refers to the
uses of the past in the present. This will be examined through an analysis
of the Culture Banks in Togo and Benin. My goal is to query the articu-
lation between local and international actors in the context of the ‘social
multilateralism’ (Louis 2011: 17–18) that characterizes the development
scene. According to Marieke Louis, ‘social multilateralism’ is situated
on the common ground of two tendencies: the ‘new multilateralism’
of Robert Cox and the ‘complex multilateralism’ of Robert O’Brien.
According to Cox, the aim of ‘new multilateralism’ is ‘to build up pres-
sure from below towards a broadening of participation and a greater
equalising of opportunities in multilateral processes’ (Cox 1997: xxi).
O’Brien defines ‘complex multilateralism’ as a ‘broadening of the policy
agenda to include more social issues’ (O’Brien et al. 2000: 210).
The concept of ‘development’ in the 1950s referred to the notion
of countries of the global South economically ‘catching up’ to coun-
tries of the global North. Rostow for instance, in his book The Stages
of Economic Growth in 1960, identified five stages common to the devel-
opment of societies from a traditional agrarian model to a contemporary
mass consumption model with a major stage of ‘take off ’ in-between
which entails growth in both investment and saving (Petiteville 2012:
115). More recently, the concept of ‘empowerment’ has entered into the
development discourse (Sen 2000). This captures Amartya Sen’s holistic
understanding of development, which shaped the contemporary notion
of ‘human development.’ In the Human Development Report of 1990,
‘human development’ is defined as:
238 M. Leloup
The diffusion of the Culture Banks model in West Africa
Fombori
MALI
Dimbal
Bamako
Degnekoro BURKINA
FA S O
Kola
GUINEA BÉNIN
Koutammakou Tanéka
NIGERIA
CÔTE TOGO
D’IVOIRE
GHANA
Porto Novo
Lomé
Chronology of the establishment of Culture Banks
Legend: Foundation of other initiative

a Culture Bank
Initiative/place Instigator Donor
1993 Craft fair (Fombori) A. Ongoiba USC Canada
1996 Community museum F. Cross and M. Oulogem USAID

(Fombori) (Peacecorps and Gestion and USC Canada
Aménagement du Territoire
[NGO])
1997 Fombori T. Crosby (Peacecorps) USAID Mali and West African

Museums Program
2002 Foundation of the NGO: World Bank Development

The African Cultural Conservation Fund Marketplace
2004 Kola and Degnekoro World Bank Institute's Contingency fund

community empowerement of J. Wolfenson
and social inclusion team
2010 Dimbal Dimmbal.ch (Swiss NGO) Geneva and other Swiss cities,
Swiss society for ethnology
and private donations
2011 Koutammakou School of African Heritage, French Ministry

Musées au service of Foreign Affairs
du développement
2012 Tanéka " "
Source: compiled by Mathilde Leloup.

© FNSP - Sciences Po, Atelier de cartographie, 2018
Fig. 1 The diffusion of the Culture Banks model in West Africa (Source
Compiled by Mathilde Leloup. © FNSP—Sciences Po, Atelier de cartographie,
2018)
… a process of enlarging people’s choices. In principle, these choices can

be infinite and change over time. But at all levels of development, the
three essential ones are for people to lead a long and healthy life, to
acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for a decent
standard of living. If these essential choices are not available, many other
opportunities remain inaccessible. (UNDP 1990: 10)
According to this notion, development must include human factors such

as the improvement of living conditions as measured by the Human
Development Index (HDI) and cannot be understood as being solely
based on economic criteria. Emanating from the perspective of ‘capabil-
ities’ as defined by Sen, this expansion of the definition of development
has to be understood to increase the choices granted to development
recipients regarding their way of life (ibid.). Sen distinguishes two kinds
of capabilities:
Human development has two sides: the formation of human capabilities

- such as improved health, knowledge and skills - and the use people
make of their acquired capabilities - for leisure, productive purposes or
being active in cultural, social and political affairs. If the scales of human
development do not finely balance the two sides, considerable human
frustration may result. (ibid.: 10)
This definition has subsequently been complemented by the ‘compre-

hensive development framework’ of Stiglitz, as a system encompassing
the economic, political, and cultural spheres (Stiglitz 2002: 163–182).
Meanwhile, the Brundtland Report launched the concept of ‘sustain-
able development’, defined as a ‘development that meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs’ (UNGA 1987). This concept initially represented
an attempt to combine economic progress with the management of finite
environmental resources. In all of these definitions, ‘development’ seems
to refer to the change of societies, toward better well-being.
The term ‘culture’ is one of the most difficult words to define in the
English language. It can encompass the conservation of cultural heritage
and cultural industries in a narrow sense but also the way of life of a
given population in a broader sense. In the case of the naming of the
240 M. Leloup
Culture Bank, the term ‘cultural heritage’ which is defined by Françoise

Benhamou as all of the ‘heterogeneous tangible and intangible properties
whose common values are aesthetic and historic’1 (Benhamou 2012: 3–
4, author’s translation) might have been more appropriate than ‘culture.’
Examining the Culture Bank Model

There has been very little scholarly research on Culture Banks to date
because they are a recent initiative. The existing literature is biased
because it has only been written by scholars who participated in the
development of extant Culture Banks. In total, one Master’s thesis,
three contributions to edited volumes, and a book exist on this subject.
Deubel’s (2003) thesis was written about the Culture Bank of Fombori.
Two of the chapters in edited volumes were penned by Aldiouma Yattara
(2007) and Daouda Keita (2007), experts selected by the World Bank
to spread the model of Culture Bank in Mali. The former explained
the genesis of the first Culture Bank in Fombori and the support of
the World Bank of this model and the latter evaluated the concrete
impact of both the Kola and Degnekoro banks. A third chapter was
written by Frederic Wherry and Todd Crosby (2011), the initiator of the
first Culture Bank, who presented the theoretical basis of the Culture
Bank model in order to distinguish his model from the general model of
micro-credit banks as set out by Mohammed Yunus. The existing Culture
Bank publications have stemmed from the disciplines of anthropology
and museology, but have not addressed the phenomenon from an Inter-
national Relations perspective. Therefore, I decided in 2014, to write
my Master’s thesis on this topic in order to demonstrate how interna-
tional organizations like World Bank or ICCROM instrumentalize local
initiatives like Culture Banks to give their global programs a ‘bottom-up’
appearance. This thesis was published as a book in 2016 by Harmattan
(Leloup 2016). As an International Relations scholar, I applied an inter-
disciplinary empirical-analytical perspective to my research. I utilized
anthropological and sociological methods during my fieldwork to analyze
the (lack of ) appropriation of the Culture Bank model by local popula-
tions. By local population, I mean in this context, the inhabitants of the
villages of Koutammakou in Togo and Taneka in Benin, who are directly

affected by the Culture Banks.
This chapter asks, whether the single structure of the Culture Bank
can combine the aspirations of Togolese and Beninese local populations
to preserve their community heritage, while enabling sustainable devel-
opment. While the Culture Bank model seems to reveal a contradiction
in goals between development and cultural heritage protection actors,
it also demonstrates a contradiction in approach between the advocates
of the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ perspectives. Having this paradox in
mind we can ask: How does the Culture Bank exemplify the paradox of
‘social multilateralism’ caught between the integration of new issues (like
cultural heritage protection) in international agendas and the emergence
of new actors as interlocutors for funding partners (local communities,
at the expense of Southern States)?
This study is based on fieldwork on the Culture Banks of Togo and
Benin. I employed ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser and Strauss 2010) and
‘participant observation’ (Quivy and Van Campenhoudt 2011) which
allowed me to more deeply understand the conditions under which the
protection of cultural heritage can contribute to more sustainable and
respectful forms of development. Initially, I hypothesized that the func-
tioning of the Culture Bank of Koutammakou in Togo—which is located
on the eponymous UNESCO World Heritage Site—would be more effi-
cient than the one in Benin, which is not directly linked to a World
Heritage Site. The field experience revealed a more complex reality: in
Togo the Culture Bank confines itself to being a community museum
dedicated to tourism, whereas in Benin the Culture Bank functions as
the core financing structure for all the NGOs in the surrounding area.
Therefore, I deduced that the success of the system of the Culture Bank
was not due to the level of valorization of the cultural site on which
the Bank is located, but rather to the appropriation of the system of the
Culture Bank by the local population.
The originality of the Culture Bank model is that it functions as
a system as it creates a real interdependence between local develop-
ment and the preservation of cultural heritage. Culture Banks combine
three aims—cultural protection through the museum, economic growth
through the micro-credit bank, and educational development through
242 M. Leloup
the training center. The model is rooted in two intertwined concepts:

the involvement of the local population in the ‘heritageisation’ process
(Vernières 2009: 11) and therefore their appropriation of the whole
system.
The Impact of the ‘Heritageisation’ Process

on the Dynamics of Local and Sustainable
Development
According to the principle of involvement that governs the Culture Bank
model, the engagement of the local population in the ‘heritageisation’
process conditions their engagement in local sustainable development.
Indeed, if the local population decides to deposit their cultural artifacts
in the Culture Bank museum, they receive a micro-credit grant from
the bank and instruction from the training center. This principle of
involvement is at the crux of the difference between the Togolese and
the Beninese Culture Banks.
According to Michel Vernières in his book Patrimoine et Développe-
ment (2009), cultural heritage does not have inherent value but is
rather a social construct. To him ‘heritageisation’ is therefore a process
that allows the ‘shift from heritage in power to heritage as a form
of commons, characterized by its economic, social, environmental and
cultural dimensions’ (ibid.: 11, author’s translation).2 Vernières acknowl-
edges that two kinds of ‘heritageisation’ exist: ‘heritageisation’ from the
inside, initiated by a family, a community or a tribe; and from the
outside, promoted by international organizations like UNESCO (ibid.:
12). The major advantage of Vernieres’ ‘types’ is that they acknowl-
edge that the appropriation of the process by the local population is a
determining factor:
[The] behavioural logics of actors, at least [the] potential [actors], of

‘heritageization’ are diverse and should not be considered separately from
the local development model to which they relate […] So, implementa-
tion of heritage politics is far from straightforward. This is all the more
true when under external pressure (UNESCO, WB, decentralized coop-

eration) […], real local appropriation of the ‘heritageization’ process is
not completed [unless it is] thoroughgoing and [carried out] in close
connection with the realities of the region’s development. In the case of
a ‘heritageization’ process driven from outside of the area, its durability
is all the more fragile if its leads to a dispossession of resident popula-
tions, not only from its management, but also from the major part of its
economic advantages. (ibid.: 12, author’s translation)3
He adds that even if the ‘heritageization’ is initiated from the outside, the
appropriation of the process by a local population can nevertheless bear
fruit from a local and sustainable development perspective (ibid.: 12).
Admittedly the start of a ‘heritageization’ process can be triggered through

an international or a national intervention, whether through the registra-
tion on the World Heritage List of UNESCO or, more modestly, from
the action of an external NGO. But what is essential, for the sustainable
valorization of heritage, is its appropriation by the resident population in
the relevant area. (ibid.: 12–13, author’s translation)4
This appropriation of the process of ‘heritageization,’ in turn, depends

on two parameters. On the one hand, it leans on the place dedicated to
heritage in the ‘socialization process’ (ibid.: 11). This is understood as
the process of the selection of the cultural heritage that is worth being
considered as such and therefore preserved and conserved by a local
community. This is determined: by its social, identity, and educational
functions in this local community. On the other hand, it relies on the
relationship maintained by the local community to its own past, that is
to say: its ‘historicity regime’ (Hartog 2003). Having in mind the theo-
retical framework of Michel Vernières that links both the processes of
heritageization and development, I shall offer a comparison between the
Togolese and Beninese Culture Banks.
244 M. Leloup
The Togolese and Beninese Culture Banks,

Two Divergent Examples
of the ‘Heritageization’ Process
In 2007, the program ‘Museums in the service of development’ was
launched by the School of African Heritage (EPA) and funded by the
Priority Solidarity Fund of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Afri-
cultures 2007: 130–131). In total, 23 people from West Africa answered
the call for proposals with innovative museums projects. Two finalists
were selected and received the funds to create two Culture Banks: Mr.
Badoualou Alizim Karka from Togo and Mr. Alassane Zoumarou from
Benin (Toffoun 2008: 3).
The major difference between the Culture Banks of Taneka (Benin)
and Koutammakou (Togo) is their international status. Koutammakou
was registered as a ‘living cultural landscape’ in 2004 according to crite-
rion 5 and 6 of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention. Koutam-
makou is considered to be ‘an outstanding example of a system of
traditional settlement that is still living and dynamic, and subject to
traditional and sustainable systems and practices, and which reflects the
singular culture of the Batammariba, particularly the Takienta tower
houses’ (Criterion 5) (ICOM/UNESCO 2004). It is regarded as ‘an
eloquent testimony to the strength of the spiritual association between
people and landscape, as manifested in the harmony between the Batam-
mariba and their natural surroundings’ (Criterion 6) (ibid.). The Culture
Bank of Taneka, on the other hand, 50 km from Koutammakou, is not
located on a listed or registered heritage site but is rather sited adjacent
to the road to the larger town of Copargo.
In both Koutammakou (Togo) and Taneka (Benin), cultural artifacts
are displayed in exhibits dedicated to three themes in three different
buildings. In Koutammakou, the three themes are: Arts and Technolo-
gies, Beliefs and Religion, and Everyday Life. In Taneka, they are:
Symbols of Power, Hunting and Fishing, and Traditional Percussion. In
the Beninese Cultural Bank, these themes are linked to walking tours on
Spirituality and Loyalty, Evasion and Resistance, and Traditional Music
and Dance that are offered to tourists by local trained guides. The tours
use the cultural artifacts in the Culture Bank as starting points for their
talks (Alassane Zoumarou, coordinator of the Beninese Culture Bank,
personal communication, 13 January 2014) (Fig. 2).
In Koutammakou, visits to the Culture Bank are led by tourist guides
as part of visit to the broader World Heritage Site. These guides are
paid by the Togolese State and most of them have not received any
training. When tourists arrive at the site, the guides offer them the
‘short circuit,’ which only encompasses the ‘takienta (tower house) resi-
dence’ built in 2004 for the visit of the director of UNESCO Koichiro
Matsuura. Alternatively, tourists are offered the ‘long circuit,’ which stops
at three inhabited takienta. On both circuits, guides rarely mention the
Culture Bank. When they do, they only refer to it as a community
museum, according to the guides of the Koutammakou site (personal
communication, 12 January 2014).
Because of the classification of Koutammakou as a World Heritage
Site, the museum of the Togolese Culture Bank was constructed in
the traditional Batammari way—in a takienta (Fig. 3). This style was
adopted to preserve the integrity of the landscape and avoid the degrada-
tion of the site. Due to the lack of insulation in the takienta and the lack
of its use, the artifacts presented in the museum decompose as a result
of exposure to humidity and insects. During visits, because of the lack of
electricity, artifacts are presented with a flashlight (Fig. 4).
In the Beninese Culture bank, on the other hand, artifacts are
presented in huts made from a mixture of concrete and earth,
Fig. 2 The Beninese Culture Bank’s three walking tours (Photo credit: Mathilde
Leloup, January 2014)
246 M. Leloup
Fig. 3 A traditional takienta in Koutammakou (Photo credit: Mathilde Leloup,

January 2014)
Fig. 4 A display case in the Togolese Culture Bank featuring a headpiece worn
during the initiation ceremonies of the Batammariba maidens (Photo credit:
Mathilde Leloup, January 2014)
which ensures good insulation and therefore preservation of the arti-

facts (Fig. 5). Furthermore, as the Togolese Culture Bank is located on a
listed site, the tangible heritage displayed in the museum is considered to
be the tangible support of the intangible heritage classified by UNESCO.
In the Beninese Culture Bank, tangible heritage is also regarded as the
tangible manifestation of traditions, but these are the fruit of a local selec-
tion rather than an external definition. The artifacts have been chosen
Fig. 5 The Beninese Culture Bank in Taneka (Photo credit: Mathilde Leloup,
January 2014)
Fig. 6 The interior of the Beninese Culture Bank (Photo credit: Mathilde Leloup,
January 2014)
for their local meanings and are still used by the NGOs of Taneka. For
example, the healing instruments are used for medicinal purposes, and
musical instruments are used in live performances and dances (Alassane
Zoumarou, personal communication, 13 January 2014) (Fig. 6).
The Impact of the ‘Heritageisation’ Process

on the Development Model
Whereas the Beninese Culture Bank in Taneka was launched by the local
population‚ the Togolese Culture Bank was created as a follow-up to the
World Heritage listing of Koutammakou. This listing seemed to produce
several negative impacts on the selection of the types of artifacts that
248 M. Leloup
are displayed, the architecture that houses these artifacts, and on the
presentation of the Culture Bank to tourists.
In fact, the negative impacts of the heritageization not only affect
the heritage aspirations of the Culture Bank, but also its developmental
goals as both are interdependent. The difference in the way cultural
artifacts are selected for display in the museums has an impact on the
types of micro-credit granted to local community members. In Koutam-
makou, as cultural artifacts are considered to be individually owned,
micro-credit is granted to individuals and serves more to reimburse the
existing debts of beneficiaries than to create income-generating activities
according to Badoualou Karka Alizim, the coordinator of the Togolese
Culture Bank (personal communication, 10 January 2014). In the Beni-
nese example, cultural artifacts are considered to be collectively owned;
therefore, micro-credit is given to the community to finance NGO activ-
ities (Alassane Zoumarou, personal communication, 13 January 2014).
This difference results in fewer defaults in the repayment of micro-credit
in Benin than in Togo. Furthermore, in Togo, the micro-credit bank
can no longer grant any credit because of the high number of reim-
bursement defaults and people cannot deposit further artifacts in the
museum because of a lack of space—the whole system has come to a
standstill. The income from tourism and the micro-credit has allowed
the construction of a training center at Taneka, which sells its outputs.
In Koutammakou this planned educational facility has been replaced by
a handicraft shop.
In the Beninese Culture Bank, the training center raises awareness
of members of the various local ethnic groups, e.g., the Yoruba, Sola,
Peuhls, Bariba, Lakpa, and Maoussa to their common heritage and
trains people in different skills such as pottery making (Ghamba Asso-
ciation), the production of shea products (Sourron Navra Association),
musical performance (Badma d’Abintaga Orchestra and Adji Adjeime),
the cultivation of medicinal plants (Medecin Taneka Association), and
agriculture (Sourron Wê Déhou) (Alassane Zoumarou, personal commu-
nication, 13 January 2014). In both the Togolese and Beninese cases,
traditionally, cultural heritage is mainly locally appreciated for its sacred
value. This value set has been challenged by the rise of Christian
evangelism and Muslim fundamentalism which both consider voodoo
heretical. The training center of the Culture Bank in Taneka educates

local people about this heritage, which diminishes the risk of the loss of
these practices and ensures intergenerational continuity. In the Togolese
example, because of a lack of funding, the training center has never been
constructed.
The differences outlined above in the ‘heritageization process’—(e.g.,
the process of the selection of the cultural heritage displayed as represen-
tative of the group)—has driven the local population in Benin to deposit
their artifacts. This is because in this Culture Bank individual families
want their heritage to be preserved and presented in order to benefit from
the available micro-credit. The exhibition of cultural heritage from the
perspective of both the layout of the artifacts in the exhibition space and
the inclusion of the museum as an element in a broader tour impacts
the number of tourists that visit the Culture Bank museum in Benin.
As certain objects are highlighted for visiting tourists, their owners, the
inhabitants of the surrounding villages, re-engage with the objects in
question. They go to see the artifacts regularly and use them as part of
traditional ceremonies. This helps minimize the risk of ‘folklorization,’
which refers here to the notion of the ‘invention of tradition’ which Yves
Robert uses to designate:
[…] societies that can perpetuate a fictitious continuity with the past
and therefore characterize themselves with some rigidity or fixity with
respect to their objectivized History. Sometimes, invented traditions are
more rigid than those that are ‘naturally traditional’. The latter concerns
societies that perpetuate a particular image of themselves knowing the
interest, economically for instance, they can take advantage of (for
example tourism within ethnic minority communities). (Robert 2007:
17, author’s translation)5
Tourists who visit the museum pay an entrance fee, helping to generate
income for the villagers, who in turn become aware of the value of
depositing their artifacts in the museum. This appropriation of the
‘heritageisation process’ by the local population has made the circle
virtuous rather than vicious. Therefore, I argue that the selection of the
artifacts for exhibition in Culture Bank Museums should not only be
oriented toward tourist interests, but also seek to promote local uses and
values.
250 M. Leloup
However, this conclusion must take into account the situation at the
Culture Bank of Dimbal, Mali. This example illustrates that not all
externally driven ‘heritageisation’ processes result in negative develop-
ment—if there is real appropriation by the local population. Like the
Koutammakou example, this Culture Bank is located on a UNESCO
World Heritage Site, which is classified both for its natural heritage—
the famous cliffs of Bandiagara—and its intangible cultural heritage.
Thanks to an awareness campaign raised by the training centre of the
Culture Bank, the local community of Dimbal united to safeguard
Sadia’s toguna threatened by Muslim fundamentalists during the Malian
conflict (Dimmbal.ch 2013: 6). In both the cases of Koutammakou and
Dimbal, the ‘heritageization’ process was led by the National Directorate
for Cultural Heritage of each respective State, together with ICOMOS
and UNESCO. In the Dimbal case, however, the NGO Dimmbal.ch
assured the follow-up to the original external initiative by securing
long-term local participation. Therefore, the Culture Bank of Dimbal
became a structure that protects the listed heritage and facilitates a local
development dynamic.
The Necessity of the Appropriation of Both

the Heritage and Economic Perspectives
through the Concept of Guarantee
In theory, the apparent contradiction between the heritage and economic
perspectives of the Culture Bank model can be solved if we consider
that both are subject to the same process of involvement and appropria-
tion. Indeed, these two perspectives in the Culture Bank model converge
within the notion of ‘guarantee’, which is the approved equivalence
between the value of the cultural artifact and the amount of money
granted by the Culture Bank in exchange.
The Guarantee, the Equivalence Between the Values

of Cultural Artifacts and Loans
In the Culture Bank model, the concept of the ‘guarantee’ supposes a

strict equivalence between a cultural artifact and the loan. It embodies
the tangle between the heritage and economic perspectives. This equiv-
alence is not innate, but ascribed. The valuation depends on the role
played by the training centre of the Culture Bank, which by providing
workshops, conferences, and courses, is the central point for the appro-
priation of the whole system of the Culture Bank. Among the various
training courses provided, the most essential one is the explanation
to the local population of the determination of the value of cultural
heritage, not for its estimated market value but for its historic value—
as crucially the credits given to beneficiaries depend on the precision on
their narrative concerning their object (Keita 2005: 18). This mechanism
encourages the local population to lend the item to the bank in order to
earn micro-credit rather than selling their cultural heritage to antiquities
dealers. Rather than gaining a one-off amount from a dealer, the loan
they receive makes this heritage bear fruit in the long-term by creating
income-generating activities contributing to sustainable development.
The main objective of the Culture Bank is to propose an alternative solu-

tion to selling cultural artefacts through the setting-up of a mechanism
of valorization of traditional cultural artefacts in favor [sic] of the whole
community: a loan is granted to each villager who deposits an artefact
in the museum. The importance of the loan is not determined by the
aesthetic value of the artefact but by its historical and cultural value. It is
not a question of selling or buying cultural artefacts but to ensure their
maintenance in their customary context in favour of the whole commu-
nity. Cultural heritage is not to be sold or bought. In sum, Culture Bank
desires to bind culture and development. (ibid.: 4, author’s translation)6
The tension between ‘culture’ and ‘bank’ in the Culture Bank model,
however, is a not only a conceptual opposition but also a real theater
of confrontation between the disciples of the heritage perspective and of
the economic one. In 2013, the conference Mali+ : le patrimoine pour
252 M. Leloup
le development that aimed at framing and professionalizing the micro-

credit use in the Culture Bank system created an argument between
the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (the heritage actor), and the
NGO Planetfinance (the economic one). To the NGO Planetfinance,
the object serves as a guarantee, ‘an element that reduces the risk of
reimbursement default. In the event of default, the guarantee should be
mobilized for the credit institution to recover its funds’ (Tastet 2013:
5, author’s translation).7 Whereas for the French Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, ‘the guarantee is for a cultural artefact that cannot be sold’ (ibid.:
5, author’s translation).8 This misunderstanding between heritage and
economic actors about the concept of the guarantee reveals an under-
lying misunderstanding about the purpose of the Culture Bank model
as a whole. For the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the goal is to
fight illicit trafficking by preventing villagers from selling their cultural
artifacts to dealers. Therefore, the seizure of these artifacts in the event
of default would be rather counter-productive if not completely contra-
dictory to the very principle of the Culture Bank. For Planetfinance, the
impossibility of seizing the object signifies an absence of the capacity of
constraint, or in other words the capacity of the structure to make the
reimbursement mandatory.
A Non-lucrative Micro-credit Bank
The originality of the Culture Bank model is that it creates equality and
equity in the terms of trade. It does not oblige the owners who deposit
their artifacts to volunteer and does not make the beneficiaries of micro-
credit enter a debt cycle. Following this perspective, because cultural
artifacts are considered to be agents of social cohesion, these objects
should be prevented from any form of economic transaction; but this
can only be made possible through compensation to the owners of these
artifacts to enable them to recover their right to choose the destination of
their property in the sense of the capabilities outlined by Amartya Sen. In
this model, donors and recipients have mutual obligations. The curator
should guarantee that the artifact is conserved according to the best
conditions whereas the beneficiaries of the micro-credit should guarantee
the benefit of its income-generating activity for the whole community.

This mutual obligation reminds one of the triple obligations of giving-
receiving-returning outlined by Marcel Mauss in his book Essai sur le
don (1968). By giving the artifact to the museum, receiving the micro-
credit from the bank, returning the credit along with creating an added
value, the whole community benefits (ibid.). This is achieved through
the ‘return’ of the object to the community (through its deposition in
the museum) rather than its alternative ‘loss’ through sale to a dealer.
The misunderstanding between the heritage and the economic actors
during the Mali + : le patrimoine pour le development seminar was in
the end based less on the concept of guarantee, than on the degree of
commitment that this guarantee implies for local populations. This in
turn depends on the degree of social integration in the community and
on the value of the artifacts, especially their religious significance. When
he created the concept of the Culture Bank, Todd Crosby theorized about
the expected impact of Culture Banks on social and symbolic capital
using Bourdieu’s concepts. This allowed him to differentiate his model
from Mohammed Yunus’s Grameen micro-credit bank:
In the Grameen model, social capital—the capacity to mobilize resources

by virtue of social ties (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993)—reduces the
likelihood of a loan default. In the Culture Bank model, symbolic
capital—the capacity to inspire deference in others by virtue of mean-
ingful icons and the collective narrative one wields (Bourdieu 1984)—
increases the likelihood that local cultural heritage is maintained, social
relationships strengthened, and small-business loans collateralized […]
Using a unique loan system, the Culture Bank transforms local symbolic
capital, namely the stories embodied in cultural objects, into a variety of
forms of capital that provide tangible benefits to local people, creating an
incentive for communities to manage their heritage resources sustainably.
(Wherry and Crosby 2011: 139–140)
The symbolic capital in Crosby’s sense is understood in reference to the

‘totem,’ a sacred artifact that embodies divinity (Durkheim 1968). Like
‘totems,’ religious and cultural artifacts deposited in Culture Banks can
be considered a double guarantee of reimbursement, because of the fear
254 M. Leloup
of divinity and of repercussions from the other members of the social

group should anything happen to the artifact:
The sacred character of the totem does not inhere in the animal, plant
or object itself. The totem reflects both the divinity and the social group.
The divinity represented by the totem stands above and apart from the
social group. The social group remains dependent on the divinity for
protection and for nurturance. Similarly the social group requires the
individuals comprising it to subsume individual interests for the sake of
the collective. (Wherry and Crosby 2011: 150–151)
Cultural Heritage and Development:

Oscillating Between Universalism
and Particularism
The interdependence between the heritage, economic, and educational
perspectives that characterizes Culture Banks can produce both, a
virtuous or a vicious circle, depending on the involvement of local popu-
lation that result from their appropriation of the system. Culture Banks,
in this regard, reveal the parallels between cultural heritage conserva-
tion and development in light of the concept of appropriation. But it
also embodies the paradox of local heritage and development projects,
which are often torn between the local and global scales, between local
communities and international organizations.
Universalization of Cultural Heritage

and Particularization of Development
At the time of the shift from the Millennium Development Goals of

the 2015 Development Agenda to the Sustainable Development Goals
of the 2030 Development Agenda, the Culture Bank model was used
as the empirical demonstration of the need to integrate culture into the
new development agenda. From the heritage perspective, the model of
the Culture Bank was also used by ICCROM to illustrate the concept of
‘preventive conservation.’ The former director of ICCROM and father

of the concept, Gaël de Guichen, defines ‘preventative conservation’ as
the:
[…] juridical, administrative, technical and administrative measures that

will be taken and implemented to ensure that collections, which shape
the material memory of a civilisation are well known by the public and
transmitted in the best possible condition to future generations’. (N’Diaye
2007: 145–146, author’s translation)9
This can be understood as a major change in the theory and practice of

the conservation of cultural heritage, as it does not consider conservation
as a passive but rather as an active process of intervention into deteri-
oration factors. This concept was introduced and implemented in the
museums of West Africa through the PREMA programme (Preventive
Conservation in Museums of Africa) in 1986 and continued by the selec-
tion of the Culture Bank model by the School of African Heritage—itself
created by ICCROM in 1998.
From an economic perspective, the Culture Bank model was seized
by the World Bank to exemplify how culture is essential to the ‘Fight
against Poverty.’ After the failure of the ‘top-down’ approach of the struc-
tural adjustment programs of the 1980s, the new paradigm of the ‘Fight
against Poverty’ was an attempt to adopt a ‘bottom-up’ approach by
empowering local communities instead of imposing conditions on States
(Cling et al. 2002: 165). The Development Marketplace, which selected
the Culture Bank model in 2002, recognized it as an example of this
new approach of ‘Empowering Poor People to Participate in Develop-
ment and Investing in Them’ (World Bank 2002b). At first glance, the
support of the Culture Bank sounds like a tokenistic attempt at sustain-
ability by ICCROM. A second view unveils it as an attempt at securing
a local initiative by the World Bank, as it included the protection of the
culture and identity of local populations. For those responsible for the
Culture Bank on the ground, appealing to international organizations
was the only manner through which to secure sufficient funding and
publicity to allow the model to be actualized.
256 M. Leloup
Over time, both the protection of cultural heritage and development

initiatives have swung between local and global scales but in oppo-
site directions. Protection of cultural heritage, inherently linked to the
preservation of the identity of local population, tends to be increas-
ingly subjected to universalization through the initiatives of bodies like
UNESCO, ICCROM, and ICOMOS. Development, on the contrary,
was according to Truman’s landmark speech in 1945, a universalist prin-
ciple that sought to raise the standard of living in poor countries to be on
par with those of rich countries (Rist 2007: 130–131). Forty years later,
this ‘one size fits all’ view of development culminated with the World
Bank’s structural adjustments programs’ in the 1980s. The failure of this
program triggered the shift to the ‘Human Development’ model through
the Report of Human Development (1990–present). Nowadays, both
the ‘Human Security’ and the ‘Development Agenda’ seek to employ a
‘bottom-up approach’ by placing individuals at the center of the principle
of Human Security for the former and by giving States some choice in
the instruments to fulfill Development Goals in the latter. The Culture
Bank, by combining both the perspectives of the protection of cultural
heritage and of development, is a theater of a real crossover between
the local and global scale. Surprisingly, the model does not very often
involve the national scale, the State. This crossover is perfectly explained
by Françoise Benhamou, quoting Immanuel Wallerstein:
Preservation of heritage is seen as a fight against the risk of disappearance

of a vulnerable site. However, the rise of tourism and economic devel-
opment should lead to hybrid solutions, sometimes difficult to define,
when it comes to ‘universalizing our particularisms and particularizing
our universals, in a kind a uninterrupted dialectical crossover’, that will
allow us to result in a new mix, new synthesis – that will, of course; be
instantaneously questioned. (Wallerstein 2006: 78, cited in Benhamou
2010: 128, author’s translation).10
Cultural Heritage and Development in Culture Banks:

The Fragmentation of States and International
Agendas
The Human Security and the Development Agenda, on the one hand,
and the registration on the World Heritage List, on the other hand,
seem to push toward opposing perspectives: particularization for the
former and universalization for the latter. Yet, the overall impact of both
is the progressive replacement of the ‘sovereignty’ of the State by the
‘responsibility’ of the international community (Badie 1999: 166–167).
Through both of these vehicles, the State is considered to be an interme-
diary between the international community and local population, but is
in fact often deprived of many of its sovereign powers. This process is
exacerbated by the increasing decentralization, which has taken place in
the majority of West African States since the 1990s. Jerome Marie and
Eric Idelman (2010) explain this decentralization through the general
willingness of these States to free themselves from the model of central-
ized Jacobin States imposed during colonization. To West African States,
decentralization can be a means to outsource some of their competen-
cies to territorial communities without completely abandoning them to
traditional authorities. For international organizations, decentralization
is understood as a democratic conditionality especially for international
financial institutions to grant development aid (Marie and Idelman
2010: 5).
In this context, the integration of culture into the Development
Agenda following the Hangzhou Conference, which stressed the intrinsic
link between natural and cultural diversity with the resilience of local
populations, can be understood in the framework of ‘social multilater-
alism.’ According to the definition provided above of ‘social multilat-
eralism,’ the integration of new issues into the international agenda—
like cultural heritage—determines the integration of new actors into
the international scene—namely the local communities. From this,
we can deduce that the integration of culture and more precisely
cultural heritage into the Sustainable Development Goals will favor a
re-configuration of the power relationships of the different actors on the
international scene. In this context, the direct interlocutor of the funding
258 M. Leloup
partners is no longer the Southern States, but the local communities

themselves. Ultimately, fragmentation has become the new principle
driving international interventions, as it is simultaneously characterized
both the sectorization of international agendas and the decentralization
of States.
Conclusion: Lessons Learned from the Culture

Bank Model in West Africa
The Culture Bank model in West Africa should be regarded as a revolu-
tionary approach to heritage management. It creates a strong interdepen-
dence between the dynamics of fighting the illicit trafficking of cultural
artifacts and promoting sustainable development. This chapter has set
out to examine the cultural and economic facets of the Culture Banks
model. Based on a comparison between two cases studies—the Togolese
and the Beninese Culture Banks—it has explained the necessity of both
the involvement in and appropriation of the ‘heritageisation’ process by
the local population in order to minimize the risk of folklorization.
This comparison also has questioned the aspirations of Culture Banks—
torn between their cultural and economic aims as well as between the
agendas of their two French donors—the Ministry of Foreign Affair and
Planetfinance.
The chapter deduces that the Culture Bank model concretizes
the paradoxical relationship between cultural heritage protection and
sustainable development. This is expressed at the local level, through
the difficult relationship between its three components—the museum,
the micro-credit bank, and the training center. At the national/bilateral
level, it is evident through the contradictions inherent in the concept of
the guarantee, which creates a strict equivalence between the values of
cultural artifacts and their respective loans. This concept sits at the crux
of the interactions between the cultural and economic donors. Finally,
it is seen at the international level in the competing visions of interna-
tional programs: the universalization of cultural heritage as promulgated
by ICCROM through the medium of ‘preventive conservation’ versus
the particularization of development as mobilized by the ‘fight against

poverty’ program of the World Bank.
Policy Suggestions
In terms of informing future policies, the lessons learnt from this model
can be used as the basis for suggesting the following points:
1. The Culture Bank model is an interdependent system. It regards the

equal contribution of heritage, economic, and educational dimen-
sions as being necessary for sustainable development. Therefore,
the balance between the three components of Culture Banks—the
museums, the micro-credit bank, and the training center—has to be
strictly respected in order to make this model useful and sustainable
for the local population in question.
2. The Culture Bank model reminds us of the central role that appro-
priation by the local population plays in every project aimed at
protecting cultural heritage or enabling sustainable development. To
ensure these aims, the local population in question has to be consulted
at each stage of the implementation of a new Culture Bank and
should have a direct interest in the initiative. The goal at the end
of the day is to create a self-sufficient local population and to reduce
the dependency on donors.
3. Converging in the notion of ‘guarantee,’ both the perspectives of the
protection of cultural heritage and local development demonstrate the
importance of considering the social cohesion within a local commu-
nity before labeling a project as bankable or not. This is all the more
true at a time of when the State in West Africa is weakening and
local communities are increasingly called upon to act as the direct
interlocutor of donors as a defense against fundamentalism.
Notes
1. ‘biens hétérogènes tangibles et intangibles dont le terreau commun est la
référence à l’histoire ou à l’Art’.
260 M. Leloup
2. ‘passage d’un patrimoine en puissance à un patrimoine reconnu en tant

que bien collectif, caractérisé tout à la fois par ses dimensions économiques,
sociales, environnementales et culturelles’.
3. ‘Les logiques comportementales des acteurs, au moins potentiels, de la
patrimonialisation sont diverses et ne sauraient être séparées des modèles de
développement local auxquels ils se réfèrent. (…) Aussi, la mise en œuvre
d’une politique patrimoniale ne va pas de soi. Il en est particulièrement
ainsi quand, sous la pression de l’extérieur (UNESCO, Banque Mondiale,
Coopération décentralisée …), une véritable appropriation locale du
processus de patrimonialisation ne s’effectue pas en profondeur et en rela-
tion étroite avec les réalités du développement territorial. Dans le cas
d’un processus de patrimonialisation initié de l’extérieur du territoire, sa
pérennité est d’autant plus fragile qu’il se traduit par une dépossession
des populations résidentes, non seulement de sa conduite, mais aussi de
l’essentiel de ses bénéfices économiques’.
4. ‘Certes, la mise en route d’un processus de patrimonialisation peut être
déclenchée par une intervention international ou nationale, qu’il s’agisse
du classement du patrimoine mondial de l’UNESCO ou, plus modeste-
ment, de l’action d’une ONG extérieure. Mais il apparaît qu’est essentielle,
pour la valorisation durable d’un patrimoine, son appropriation par les
populations résidentes sur le territoire considéré’.
5. ‘Ce sont des sociétés qui peuvent entretenir une continuité fictive avec
le passé et donc se caractériser par une certaine rigidité ou fixité par
rapport à une histoire objectivée. Parfois les traditions inventées sont plus
rigides que celles qui sont « naturellement traditionnelles ‘. Ce dernier
rapport concerne notamment des sociétés qui perpétuent une certaine
image historique d’elles-mêmes sachant l’intérêt, par exemple économique,
qu’elles peuvent en retirer (tourisme au sein des minorités ethniques)’.
6. ‘L’objectif principal de la Banque Culturelle est de proposer une solu-
tion alternative à la vente des objets culturels par la mise en place d’un
mécanisme de mise en valeur des objets culturels traditionnels en faveur
de toute la communauté́ : un prêt est octroyé́ à chaque villageois qui
dépose un objet culturel au musée. L’importance de ce prêt n’est pas
déterminée par la valeur esthétique de l’objet mais plutôt par sa valeur
historique et culturelle. Il ne s’agit donc pas de vendre ou d’acheter les
biens culturels mais d’assurer leur maintien dans leur contexte habituel
au profit de toute la communauté́. L’héritage culturel n’est ni à vendre ni
à acheter. En somme, la Banque Culturelle ambitionne de lier culture et
développement’.
7. ‘un élément qui réduit le risque de non-remboursement. En cas d’impayé,

la garantie doit être mobilisée afin que l’institution de crédit puisse
récupérer ses fonds’.
8. ‘la garantie est l’objet culturel qui ne peut être vendu’.
9. ‘C’est l’ensemble de toutes les mesures juridiques, administratives, tech-
niques et éducatives qui seront prises et appliquées pour s’assurer que
les collections qui forment la mémoire matérielle d’une civilisation soient
connues par le public aujourd’hui et transmises dans le meilleur état aux
générations futures’.
10. ‘La préservation du patrimoine est pensée comme un combat contre
le risque de disparition d’un lieu avant tout vulnérable. Pourtant, la
montée du tourisme et le développement économique devraient conduire
à des solutions hybrides, parfois difficiles à définir, lorsqu’il s’agit «
d’universaliser nos particularismes et de particulariser nos universels, en
une espèce de chassé-croisé dialectique ininterrompu, qui nous permettra
d’aboutir à de nouveaux métissages, à de nouvelles synthèses – qui seront
bien entendu aussi instantanément à remettre en question’.
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Exhibition Making as Aesthetic Justice: The
Case of Memorial Production in Uganda
Kara Blackmore
Between Peace, Development, and Heritage

Peacebuilding and development actors working across Africa have come
to recognize the role memory can play in both shaping productive and
‘reconciled’ societies in postwar contexts, as well as in entrenching divi-
sive identities that can (re)ignite cycles of violence. This is partly due
to the functional role that memory plays in transitional justice efforts
that promote the externalization of memory as evidence within judicial
witnessing, as collective memory in truth commissions, and as heritage
enshrined through memorials. In this chapter, the politics of memory,
the processes of memorialization, and the dynamics of localized justice
will be explored through the case study of Uganda with specific attention
K. Blackmore (B)
Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa, London, UK

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_10
266 K. Blackmore
given to the Travelling Testimonies exhibition (2013–2014), curated by

the author. Examples of archiving, performing, and curating temporary
memorial spaces in Uganda offer opportunities for considering memorial
production and investigate potential avenues for realizing justice beyond
the courtroom.
Uganda is a valuable case study for unpacking the relationship
between peaceable development and heritage. As a nation, its develop-
ment has been deeply disrupted by widespread violence, coupled with
a growing tension between state selective amnesia and localized efforts
to remember traumatic events. The Refugee Law Project’s Transitional
Justice Audit (2011–2014) referenced 125 different armed conflicts that
have impacted Uganda since its independence from colonial Britain in
1962 (2015: 3). In addition, there has been no transition of presiden-
tial power for three decades. Furthermore, the Red Cross estimated
that in 2013 12,000 people were still missing due to the war in the
north that pitted government forces against the Lord’s Resistance Army
(ICRC 2013). Ongoing fighting by rebel groups in neighboring nations
remains problematic for families of the missing. For survivor communi-
ties, questions still loom over how to commemorate atrocities that did
not only involve killings, but also other acts such as enforced displace-
ment, abductions, and sexual violence. Sites set up to remember and
repair historical injuries—that span as far back as the era of the colo-
nial regiment of British East Africa, known as the King’s African Rifles,1
are diffuse in terms of their references to space and time. Cultural
exhibitions, photography initiatives, the creation of archives, and mass
grave excavations relating to post-colonial conflicts have received support
from international development actors such as World Vision, Caritas,
the Norwegian Refugee Council, USAID, Associazione Volontari per
il Servizio Internazionale (AVSI) and the Japan International Cooper-
ation Agency (JICA). These actors have sponsored museum collections,
commemoration ceremonies, the preservation of an Internally Displaced
Persons (IDP)camp as a heritage site, and the removal of bodies from
former displacement camps.
Within this context, it is important to question how memorialization
might contribute to or disrupt efforts for peace, justice, and reconcilia-
tion. To date, relatively little is known about what the memorialization
Exhibition Making as Aesthetic Justice … 267
of past violence actually does for communities who remember the event
firsthand and who continue to be afflicted by its legacy in their daily lives
(Brown 2012; Buckley-Zistel and Schaifer 2014; McDowell and Braniff
2014). Despite this lack of evidence on the effects of memorials, there
has been a global increase in their production as an essential component
of postwar nation building. After the end of the Cold War, Europe and
the USA participated in what has been described as a ‘memory boom’
(Winter 2001), and a ‘rush to commemorate,’ (Williams 2007) that has
been transformed into a global ‘fever of atonement’ (Soyinka 1998: 90)
or a ‘tyranny of total recall’ (Theidon 2009: 297). Entire disciplines
of research and frameworks for international law were formed around
the reaction to the Second World War, in part because the documenta-
tion of atrocities during and after the Holocaust revealed unprecedented
levels of identity-based extermination (Levy and Sznaider 2011). Wars
and events of war (like the use of the atomic bomb) have been ranked
at the top of global collective memory indicators (Anheier et al. 2011).
The question arises: Does this global industry of ‘dark heritage,’ now a
fully formed research field in its own right, actually contribute to a more
peaceful world, a more just society? Are we as researchers and practi-
tioners looking in the right places to monitor, evaluate, and participate
in achieving justice?
Concepts of development, heritage, and memorialization will be
employed to help address the questions raised above. There is a widely
accepted peacebuilding paradigm employed in post-conflict2 societies
that assumes transitional processes will usher emerging democratic soci-
eties into competitive economic liberalization—thereby enabling ‘devel-
opment’ (Jarstad and Sisk 2008; Newman et al. 2009). However,
disagreement about the past can detour peace. Different actors may
seek to make heritage that entrenches conflicting narratives. In some
cases, societies cannot engage Jürgen Habermas’ deliberative demo-
cratic option of utopian negotiation whereby disagreement can be faced
without violence, thus enabling them to embrace public resistance
(2004). Instead, disagreement can fester, silencing dissent to such an
extent that violence becomes the preferred outlet of expression. As many
scholars have shown, the negotiations of memory around memorials are
268 K. Blackmore
meaningful domains for unpacking disagreement and discontent in post-

conflict societies, even when it seems the narratives have been set (Ibreck
2012). In this chapter, peacebuilding efforts within Uganda, and specif-
ically the Rwenzori Mountain region of Kasese, serve as the arena for
understanding the transition from a situation regarded as a humanitarian
emergency and security threat, to a process of unifying people in times
of unstable peace. The work presented insists that focusing merely on the
absence versus the presence of memorials, or work restricted to analyzing
the product of the memorial rather than the process of its making, misses
out on the potential for self-determination in the process of making
memorial spaces. Examining the case study of the Travelling Testimonies
exhibition will show that even if a political transition has not taken place,
efforts to establish an ethics of justice, whereby war-affected peoples enter
into a set of agreements about what constitutes justice, can illuminate the
status of the disagreement and thus inform democratic preconditions for
development and change.
Memory in the Liberal Peacebuilding

Paradigm
Memory work and memorialization are relatively new additions to the
liberal peacebuilding portfolio. They have found a place in the sub-field
of transitional justice and are gaining support in the social project of
post-conflict transformation. This is part of a shift toward focusing on
victims as both central to societal healing and necessary for fostering
sustainable peace—which is regarded as a prerequisite for (sustainable)
‘development.’ Contributions are increasingly related to micro-histories
of violence, work on the politics of identity, and investigations into
everyday experiences during conflict. Andreas Huyssen (2011) regards
the relationship between memory and peacebuilding as a set of shared
aspirations about right and wrong, giving way to a mutually reinforcing
human rights discourse and juridical practice. It is through this discourse
that the traumas of past conflicts are understood within a framework
of justice, most specifically their presumed ability to achieve symbolic
reparation. Within developing nations, these efforts become ever more
entangled in transnational politics of aid, humanitarian intervention, and

international security.
Through the lens of transitional justice (TJ), one can find a space for
analyzing broad sweeping claims of peacebuilding and reconciliation to
examine the relationship between memorialization and notions of justice.
The core pillars of TJ—institutional reform, prosecutions, truth commis-
sions, reparations, and memorialization—are being employed across the
globe as a go-to framework for nearly 30 nations currently emerging
from armed conflict or authoritarian rule (International Center for Tran-
sitional Justice 2007). A toolkit approach to TJ has come to include
memorialization as a kind of ‘symbolic reparation’ whereby victims can
rebalance the symbolic harm they have endured and in turn move
forward to be productive members of a tolerant and democratic society.
TJ is one avenue of peacebuilding that encompasses liberal ideas of
creating an accountable society. Courts and formal justice systems are
the backbone of TJ, using the legislative framework as a foundation for
institutions, accountability, and trust that democratic processes rely on
(Sharp 2013). TJ’s focus on building legislative institutions is thought to
have a spillover effect into judicial frameworks for trade, political codes
of conduct, and sensibilities of social responsibility (Lopez 2014). Specif-
ically, international justice has been established as a mainstay of TJ’s role
in the peacebuilding domain. For example, the Nuremberg Tribunals set
a precedent for international collaboration to try perpetrators for state-
sponsored violence (Karstedt 2013). The Nuremberg Principles continue
to define human rights violations and set a frame for how legislative
action should be performed. In doing so, the trials created a mythology
around impunity and state responsibility (Andrieu 2010; Bell 2006) that
casts a shadow on postwar nations outside of the Second World War
context. In this way, TJ represents a type of cosmopolitanism hinged on
a set of transnational shared values that is central to the liberal paradigm
and post-conflict justice efforts (Nagy 2008).
Scholars and beneficiaries have warned against the blanket interven-
tions embedded within the TJ toolkit, specifically truth seeking and the
use of courts (Andrieu 2010; Baines 2010; Lekha Sriram 2007). In most
cases these critiques reference the ineffectiveness of truth commissions to
access comprehensive truth or the lengthy and costly reality of judicial
270 K. Blackmore
proceedings (McEvoy 2007). Critics show that TJ’s toolkit approach is

impractical for fostering ‘local ownership’ of international justice norms,
often disregarding context-specific justice frameworks used to negotiate
social unrest (Nagy 2008; Tietel 2003; Lekha Sriram 2007). This was
perhaps most poignantly captured by the fiery critiques around the devel-
opment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 2002
(Allen 2006; Niang 2017; Mbeki and Mamdani 2014)
Uganda highlights the tensions addressed in TJ and peacebuilding
literature. Idi Amin’s controversial commission of inquiry into the Disap-
pearances of People in Uganda (1974) is often referenced as one of
the first official ‘truth’ commissions to have been initiated.3 Uganda
was also the first nation to have arrest warrants issued by the ICC
(2005) against four leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army, who waged
a war in the north of Uganda (1996–2007), with spillover effects into
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and
what is today South Sudan. It took 13 years before Dominic Ongwen,
one of the commanders accused, stood trial at the ICC. In addition
to the ICC’s LRA vs. Government of Uganda (GoU) case, amnesties
have been extended to ex-combatants and returnees from a multitude
of conflicts across the country. Importantly, the Uganda Crimes Divi-
sion has set up a complimentarily4 domestic trial to try defendants,
such as Thomas Koywelo who had been denied amnesty. To complete
an accountability package, donor support has gone into performing
and crystallizing traditional justice mechanisms. When justice in this
sense is ritually performed in the contemporary moment it becomes a
form of heritage—a vision of the past, performed in the present, for an
aspirational future.
Following critiques of the formal mechanisms, traditional justice was
seen as a means to counterbalance and ‘localise’ accountability. Tradi-
tional justice mechanisms can occupy a locus of culturally relevant
attempts to seek accountability, yet they are in danger of becoming
commodified and institutionalized through development practices—thus
diluting their symbolic legitimacy and their ability to act in an educa-
tive/advocative role (Allen and MacDonald 2013; Branch 2011; Shaw
2007). Tim Allen and Anna MacDonald (2013) have demonstrated that
gacaca used in post-genocide Rwanda and other traditional mechanisms
such as the Acholi mato oput , might lack the essentialist ‘local’ quali-
ties that international agencies seek to counterbalance their top-down
approaches, in part because the tradition becomes standardized to fit
the necessity of state-wide liberal transfer (2013). This creates a kind
of ‘memory entrepreneurship’ hinging on a reparations discourse that
seeks to value victim experiences and encourages a transactional approach
to witnessing and trauma (Hamber and Wilson 2002). Adam Branch
(2014) has warned of the ‘ethnojustice’ agenda’s ability to prioritize one
system over another and universalize or standardize its application, thus
creating further divisions in multivalent societies that might be prone to
identity-based violence.
The above tensions around formalized justice and traditional justice
requires academics and practitioners to work beyond the legalistic frames
for understanding justice. As a contribution to this gap, this chapter will
adopt the idea of ‘aesthetic justice,’ a concept used by some scholars
in an attempt to insert new aspects into an arena otherwise dominated
by factual and forensic understandings of law and justice (Gielen and
Tomme 2015). Proponents of aesthetic justice offer artistic interven-
tions as means to illuminate injustice, recalibrate justice norms, and
present new approaches to law-making. In the analysis that follows,
these concepts will be expanded into heritage making and memorial
production. In doing so, the propositions offered by those who advo-
cate for aesthetic justice are teased out through archives, artworks, and
the coming together of an exhibition platform to make a heritage that
is often otherwise sidelined in the national psyche of Uganda. What
emerges is an uncovering of an ethics of justice whereby accountability,
acknowledgment, performance, and memorial production serve to create
agreements about wrongs in both abstract and collective ways, divorced
from the individualizing nature of court proceedings and formal justice
mechanisms.
The Exhibition Process

When the Refugee Law Project—a community outreach organization of
the Makerere University School of Law—started inviting public- and
272 K. Blackmore
cultural institutions to help write Uganda’s history, they were not sure
what might come out of it. Through their outreach work and radio
shows, the employees of their National Memory and Peace Documen-
tation Centre (NMPDC) called upon war-affected peoples to enrich
the history of war and peace through their own testimonies. Almost
immediately stories started to be narrated with objects, providing new
materials through which the organization could structure their efforts
to document the past. Collections amassed with the idea of creating
a museum as an active discursive space to support the long-term goals
of accessing truth and stimulating reconciliation. The products of these
ever-growing collections have been displayed during conferences, shared
in publications, and called upon for research. The 2013 exhibition Images
of War and Peacemaking was a project born out of a response to commu-
nity members in Kitgum (where the NMPDC is located) who began
offering materials to illustrate their war histories around the LRA vs.
GoU conflict. While separate research could be done analyzing the
objects and archives, the discussion below is concerned with what can
be gleaned from the process of curating the exhibition. For example, it is
not the blanket of a missing person, but the intentions behind its dona-
tion and the kinds of productive outputs that arose from its transition
from a personal item of endearment to an item on public display, that
are of importance. How does the value and power of each object transfer,
diffuse, or become magnified by its recontextualization in the collection
and or exhibition?
The open-ended exhibition concept was rooted in research conducted
among war-affected communities in Uganda in 2007 that revealed that
at least 95% of the respondents wanted the establishment of memorials
as a way to remember what happened (ICTJ 2007: 32). The war-affected
population related that they believed that future generations should
know the truth about their experiences (ICTJ 2011). This was codified
in the Juba Peace Agreement between the LRA and GoU which calls for
the establishment of memorials and commemorations as part of the repa-
rations package (Juba Peace Agreement 2007 section 9.1). Despite this,
there have been very few efforts toward a comprehensive heritageization
of Uganda’s conflicts. The projects that do exist have been confined to
addressing the Lord’s Resistance Army versus GoU war. Support from
the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, and the Demo-
cratic Governance Facility, enabled the Refugee Law Project to move
beyond this well-known conflict and tour the country from December
2013 to May 2014 to build a national heritage centered on the themes
of war and peace, continuously collecting, documenting, and creating
spaces for justice to emerge. This process, which is still ongoing, is called
the Travelling Testimonies. What began as an exhibition has transformed
into a methodology.
Civil society organizations, cultural institutions, individuals, and
artists were invited to inform the proposition of collecting self-created
histories at four sites in the semi-urban towns of Kasese, Luwero,
Arua,and Kitgum (Fig. 1). These four sites represent key locations in
conflicts. Including, the LRA vs. GoU conflict discussed above (1986–
2007); The War of Liberation commonly referred to the Luwero Triangle
or Luwero Bush War (1981–1986) that gave rise to the current National
Resistance Movement ruling party; the legacy of Idi Amin’s rule (1971–
1979) manifested in the operations carried out by the Uganda Army
and the subsequent retaliations as well as the actions carried out by
rebel groups like West Nile Bank Front (1995–1997), Uganda National
Liberation Army (I and II) (1979–1986), and Uganda National Rescue
Front (1980–2002) and the legacy of the Rwenzururu rebellion (1919–
present), which is connected to the National Army for the Liberation of
Uganda (1980s) and the Allied Democratic Forces (1990s–present) (see
further discussion below).
The rough timelines and georeferences offered for context here were
regularly blurred on the ground due to the interconnected realities of
Ugandan conflicts over time and through space as regional conflicts.
Respondents often confused the names of rebel groups and combined
them based on the types of violence they employed. Visitors to the exhi-
bition also urged that any timelines offered must depict these conflicts as
continuing because they spill over and transform into ongoing conflicts.
In touring these areas, it was thought that significant inputs from visi-
tors would extend the collection and build up a set of narratives that
could address smaller conflicts or splinter rebellions in other regions.
Community organizations aligned with a transitional justice mission
based on the pillars of TJ were the key voices in molding the anchor
274 K. Blackmore
Fig. 1 The Travelling Testimonies exhibition sites (Developed by Shaffic Opinyi,

Refugee Law Project)
points for the exhibition(s) and took the lead in identifying participants
with ‘iconic’ testimonies. Many of these survivors and organisations
had previously engaged in conversations on historical traumas though
the RLP’s Transitional Justice Audit. Others were identified through
snowballing samples. In sum, they represented a range of war-affected
citizens, including those who might be classified as victims, survivors, ex-
combatants, artists, representatives of cultural institutions, community
ambassadors, and government officials. These individuals were central to
pre-site meetings and consultation sessions which provided the founda-
tion for the collection and documentation processes. They also provided
psychosocial support during the exhibition open days in each respective
location. Preliminary meetings showed that the majority of residents of
Kasese were generally excited to break a perceived silence, those in Arua
were somewhat apathetic about engaging the past, and in Luwero they
were a bit disgruntled due to the previous rejection of their role in the
liberation struggle by the ruling elite. Each location revealed a different
kind of relationship between residents and the state, localized forms of
healing, and ideas about the usefulness of memorial processes. To have
created a kind of national strategy for permanent remembrance would
have disregarded this dynamic diversity.
The building-block style exhibition began with the materials from the
first exhibition Images of War and Peacemaking (2013) that focused on
Kitgum. Participants at each venue were then invited to extend and
remake the narratives as the primary owners and producers of history.
Simultaneously, they reflected on the contributions from the other
venues. It is at this juncture that the narrative power that would have
been ascribed to the curatorial team’s authority was initially diffused.
In doing so, didactic and linear narrative conventions were surrendered.
Participation in the process positioned me as the curator to become part
activist, part researcher, part creator. Using a reflexive ethnographic lens,
the exhibitions tried to provide spaces to explore ‘dialogical truth(s)’
between people (Sachs 2002: 53). Sachs defines this concept as a point
when ‘the debate between many contentions and points of view goes
backward and forward, and a new synthesis emerges, holds sway for
awhile, is challenged, controverted, and a fresh debate ensues. The
process is never ending; there is no finalised truth […] It thrives on
276 K. Blackmore
the notion of a community of many voices and multiple perspectives’

(Ibid.). This approach transferred the theoretical debates about memory,
the roles of the citizen and state, memorial heritage, identity, and power
into a performative space. Although the ‘performative turn’ in memorial
heritage research looks at how people interact with spaces and things,
it rarely offers an ethnography of production (Haldrup and Bærenholdt
2015).
A temporary space was secured at each site. Uganda’s lack of exhibi-
tion infrastructure provided an opportunity to seek out existing social
spaces that were familiar. Stakeholder meetings helped to identify acces-
sible, politically neutral, and welcoming venues. For example, a primary
school or sports field. We once used a church, and although the secular
or separatist critic might infer that this created division, we found the
opposite—that memory and memorial were viewed as sacred and there-
fore well suited for display within a religious space. On one occasion,
a social services center in a former displaced persons camp compound
was used. This symbolic setting was unanimously agreed by partici-
pating local partners to be a symbolically potent space in which to revisit
past experiences. Each exhibition was hosted for three to five days at
its respective venue due to budget and personnel constraints. However,
after observing the charged nature of the spaces through the produc-
tion process, it was deemed essential to maintain an ephemeral quality
to the exhibition. Although there is currently little empirical evidence
on retraumatization and memorials, the team considered that enduring
forms of the exhibition might have created retraumatization or dishar-
mony because the crystallizations of narrative or co-optation of narrative
disrupts the dialogical format that this type of exhibition making seeks
to implement.
During each exhibition, selected individuals that had been identified
by partner organizations as having ‘iconic’ stories as well as interested
audience members, invited through public advertising, were offered an
opportunity to articulate a part of their ‘truth’ about what happened
in the past and how they perceived a peaceable future. The equipment
used to document such inputs usually included scanners, video recorders,
audio recording devices, stationary for writing labels, and artistic partici-
pation spaces. During the open days, it was not possible to predict what
contributions any particular audience member might want to add, rather

the team just had to be prepared to receive often-unexpected contri-
butions. Community ambassadors were on call to provide psychosocial
support to those offering personal testimonials that might retraumatize
them.
The result of this initial endeavor is a growing collection of 204
photographs, 112 objects, 120 artworks, 365 pages of archives, 47 hours
of testimonials, and 3 DVDs of archival footage. The ongoing process
of creating such a collection is as much a key to understanding the
surrounding tensions and contestation as the products themselves. The
‘collection also becomes a way to access the present and to think of
learning and knowledge as “eventualities”, which take shape in situations
that are not necessarily prescribed but are part of the process’ (Anguelova
2012: 9). Each iteration of the Travelling Testimoniesexhibition provides
a unique set of collected memories, illuminating strategies for everyday
reconciliation and the potentiality for the heritage making to be seen as
a form of justice.
Travelling Testimonies in Kasese

Focusing on one of the five locations of the Travelling Testimonies exhibi-
tion will illustrate the process of producing heritage around past violence.
In 2014 we presented the first comparative displays of the LRA vs. GoU
war in Kasese, a town nested in a region of Uganda that has suffered
more than 100 years of conflict in the border region of the Rwenzori
Mountains. Straddling the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC),
these dense mountains are home to several (contested) tribal groups and
kingdoms which have been the site of conflict since the colonial era.
Ongoing episodes of violence include: the Rwenzururu rebellion5 which
fed into the 1980s establishment of the National Army for the Libera-
tion of Uganda (NALU); regular clashes over land; and the development
of the Islamic fundamentalist group the Allied Democratic Forces in the
1990s, who remain operational in neighboring DRC. The government
of Uganda’s responses to the violence have included armed combat, the
planting of land mines, the deployment of special intelligence forces,
278 K. Blackmore
and the banning of cultural rituals at shrines. Conversely, the Kingdom

of Rwenzururu has maintained its kingdom-appointed royal guards to
protect King Charles Mumbere and the kingdom’s cultural shrines. As
recently as 2016, there were clashes between the Kingdom of Rwenzu-
ruru and the GoU, in which it is estimated that more than 100 men,
women, and children were killed by government soldiers. This attack was
a retaliation against the kingdom’s royal guards who refused to surrender
at their town offices after it was alleged that they attacked two Kasese
police posts. The clashes culminated in the storming of the palace and
the arrest of King Mumbere (Human Rights Watch 2016).
In the context of the exhibition held in 2014, survivors, educators,
ex-combatants, and members of the general public joined in a three-
day program of simultaneous exhibition display and documentation held
over the weekend of Palm Sunday. The narratives, materials on display,
and performances were co-designed by the curator, the Refugee Law
Project team, and members of social justice, cultural or educational
organizations in the region. During the three days of display, hundreds
of visitors came to view the exhibition and more than 25 individuals
contributed their memories, artifacts, artworks, and archives. The anal-
ysis below focuses on this process and argues that ideas of law, justice, and
reconciliation are being reframed through the relational making of place,
history, and collective memory, which occurred during the exhibition.
Examples of archiving, artistic production, and dramatic performance
will be explored to make sense of the ever-changing nature of such
exhibition production.
Tracing and Making the Archive

For contemporary residents of the Rwenzori region, the official archive is
a mysterious and amorphous entity. Yet, the memories related to events
inscribed in colonial or post-colonial government documents, housed
or destroyed in archives, as well as KoR documents that were created
during the height of the Rwenzururu Rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s,
ascribed value to the archive—official or personal—as both a site of
memory recall and a legitimate space to narrate heritage. Furthermore,
the processes of transition and cycles of ‘peace-to-violence-to-peace’ are

surrounded by humanitarian archives from refugee settlements, anti-
mining initiatives, and the Amnesty Commission. In an effort to see ‘the
archive’—as a collection of official and personal documents—this next
section will illuminate the negotiation of heritage in the public space of
the exhibition.
It is first important to explain what the official archive is and how citi-
zens may be challenged to engage with it. The national archive resides in
Kampala, which is four to seven hours by vehicle from any given town in
the Rwenzori region. A portion of the national archive is housed at the
Mountains of the Moon University in the largest regional town of Fort
Portal. Items that might be of interest to the heritage of conflict and
peace are the files containing district and national reports; correspon-
dence dating to times of conflict; census data; and maps detailing tribal
lands, conservation areas, roads, and population density. It is also impor-
tant to highlight the six-year ($150,000) project that reports to have
digitized 410,000 documents in the Mountains of the Moon Univer-
sity archive.6 Both repositories require users to obtain clearance from the
Uganda National Council of Science and Technology (UNCST). One
can only apply for access online and only if one has an institutional affil-
iation that is approved by UNCST. The processes of clearance involve
the completion of several forms, the provision of letters of approval from
educational institutions, and lengthy descriptions of what the user of the
archive intends to do with the material. Note that the desire to know
one’s own history as a citizen does not garner UNCST clearance or
access to the archives. Given these barriers, there were regular requests
by exhibition visitors and collaborators to access and display documents
contained in the official archives. The residents of Kasese expressed an
interest in the official archive as part of a perceived need to validate their
narratives of oppression by the ruling elite.
Specific documents featured in pre-exhibition planning discussions.
For example, the 1932 Toro Land Act in which the people of the
Bakonzo language and cultural community were subsumed into the Toro
Kingdom. This is said to be the foundation of the conflict that led to the
August 15, 1962, Declaration of Independence in which Konzo language
speakers asserted their own identity as separate from the Toro majority
280 K. Blackmore
who had been aligned to the British colonial administration. The archives
of this movement are part of the legacy left by the Bakonzo Life History
Association that conducted research in the 1950s and 1960s to empha-
size their uniqueness and to mark the cultural attributes of the Bakonzo
as those of a legitimate Kingdom of Rwenzori. Another document that
was commonly referenced was the limited print edition pamphlet ‘20
Years of Bitterness,’ written by the former Rwenzururu rebellion leader
Amon Bazira (1982). The Land Act, Declaration of Independence, and
the Bazira ‘manifesto’ were viewed as critical anchor points onto which
the lineage and legacy of resistance and oppression could be linked.
Therefore, I was tasked as the curator to find these, and related docu-
ments, to put on public display during the exhibition. Only the Toro
Land Act was available in a national repository. It was retrieved by sifting
through abandoned boxes covered in dust and detritus, mixed in with
other important colonial era and post-independence documents in the
back of a commercial warehouse which was formerly owned by the
Government Printers in the colonial seat of Entebbe.7
The Declaration of Independence and the manifesto by NALU leader
Amon Bazira were retrieved from private archives belonging to individ-
uals who participated in the exhibition’s production. This spurred an
investigation on behalf of our team members to uncover other personal
documents that might inform the archival heritage of the region and
the struggle of the Bakonzo. Materials like a 1951 Rwenzururu United
Kingdom Ministry of Defense, Army Certificate of Qualification was
presented as well as clippings from 1960s newspapers that recounted the
numbers of people who died in the fighting between the Batoro and the
Bakonzo. One woman even brought her copy of Tribe, a text written by
journalist Tom Stacey who was instrumental in the Bakonzo Life History
project and partly negotiated the Rwenzururu struggle between King
Isaya and then president, Milton Obote. At the time of the exhibition,
Tribe was seen as ethnographic evidence for self-determination whereby
an oral history had been turned into a written one. It was so powerful
that people rumored it had been banned after the 2016 clashes.
As materials were brought to the team during the 2014 exhibition, we
worked to digitize them. After scanning, materials were reprinted and
placed on a dialogue table that encouraged a process of transformation
from archival documents to heritage objects with negotiated labels. In

this way, the authoritative position of an archive as official history was
interpreted through object labels and people decided which sections of
archives were relevant for public display. For example, the selection, scan-
ning, and reprinting of the following extract from Bazira’s ‘20 Years of
Bitterness’ (1982: 13):
The secret weapon of tribal interest groups as we saw during Amin’s rule,
has been the ability to galvanise their positions for specific political objec-
tives by counting on ancestral homes. Tribal politics carried as they have
been in our political evolution, to excess have proven harmful to the
national interest. They have generated both unnecessary animosities and
illusions of common interest where little or none exists. Specific policies
favoured by organised tribal groups can generate fractious controversy and
bitter recrimination.
Throughout the text, Bazira highlights casualties on both sides of the

Batoro-Bakonzo conflict and works to both stabilize Bakonzo identity
while defusing the tribalistic divisions at the root of such tensions. One
can see from the extract above that he also draws in the legacy of Idi
Amin. Visitors to the exhibition who highlighted this archival extract
insisted on two contextual points; firstly that the conflict was part of a
‘political evolution’ as stated by Bazira, and secondly that to illustrate the
history one must see it as part of a deep legacy of nation building and
failed attempts at leadership.
Beyond the Rwenzururu rebellion, other archives were presented
to describe the emergence, impact, and displacement of the Allied
Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel group that occupied the region in
the 1990s and early 2000s. The materials donated to the exhibition
showed a personal relationship with the project of building the archive,
through the inclusion of personal narratives and photographs. One of
the most comprehensive donations was a compilation of images and
testimonies from Father Landas Bwambale, Priest of the Diocese Kasese,
and Director of St. John’s Seminary in Kitambula, Kasese. His archive
relates to the August 16, 1996, attack on the seminary that resulted in
the abduction of 19 boys studying at the premises. Father Bwambale
282 K. Blackmore
brought together 11 of the 19 abducted students who returned after

being forcibly conscripted into the ADF. He encouraged them to write
their stories as a way of making sense of the past and fostering soli-
darity among returnees. A brother of one of the deceased boys who was
abducted in 1996 and killed in the mountains, visited the exhibition.
He worked onsite to edit his brother’s story and added images of his
brother to bolster the memorial capacity of the archive. These contribu-
tions worked to create a heritage which reached beyond the newspaper
coverage of events, amnesty commission reports (of 2200 ADF fighters),
or army correspondence that would be found in the national archives.
In doing so, the collection of narratives is less about accruing ‘data’ and
more about capturing lived experiences of abduction, displacement, and
return. As a result of the display, members of the returnee group spent
time narrating firsthand what they had written, to give potency and
orality to their stories. One member noted that he wanted to show that
they (forcibly conscripted rebels) are trying to work toward building a
peaceful community for their families and should not be regarded solely
as fighters to be feared and rejected.8
NGO employees and those impacted by land mines in the region also
participated in producing personal or institutional archives that would
illustrate this critical aspect of the everyday experience of conflict in
the Rwenzori region. Wilson Bwambale donated photographs from the
Anti-Mines Network Rwenzori’s work with the Danish Demining Group
conducted in 2011, exactly twenty years since the first known mine was
planted. These materials illustrated community events of ‘sensitisation’
to help identify and safely detonate land mines. One photograph of a
young boy in a school uniform ignited the story of his experience as the
school timekeeper, whereby he had rung a ‘bell’ everyday not knowing
that it was actually an undetonated cluster-bomb. Only after the anti-
mining work was it realized that for almost a year he had been saved
from the potential explosion of the four bombs inside the shell he had
been banging to call his fellow students to class. During the three days
of the exhibition, the experiences of landmine survivors were vocalized
again and again. People even offered to donate old prosthetics to the
collection as ‘proof ’ of their social and physical harm.
Fig. 2 Theatre performers photographing the archival table at Travelling

Testimonies in Kasese, Uganda (Photo credit: Kara Blackmore, 2014)
All the archives brought into the Travelling Testimonies exhibition in

Kasese formed a kind of evidence of past injustices that are marginal-
ized in official discourses (Fig. 2). Ranging from capturing the ideologies
behind rebellions to recording the exact dates of events on a timeline,
there was an overwhelming pressure on the exhibition team to be agents
of knowledge accumulation. The demand to make a heritage in this way
was also about making a space for justice in spite of or in parallel to
formal justice mechanisms. Because the visitors often saw their struggle
as a long history of self-determination, the mere process of recognition
through knowledge and display worked as an arena to articulate injustice
as well as a forward-facing glimpse into being equitable citizens.
These kinds of harvestings of the archives and resultant presentations
that ripple into communities offer a starkly different reading of the past
than those which rely on the use of the official record as primary ‘agents
of heritage’ (Peterson 2012). The entanglements of conflict histories
between the Rwenzururu Rebellion and the ADF, for example, disrupt
Derek Peterson’s reading of the region’s past that relied on the official
archive. In the exhibition space, historical figures that Peterson focused
on as key players did not even feature, census documents that show
284 K. Blackmore
the evolution of Konzo identity seemed irrelevant and the linear depic-
tion of the mounting tensions that one takes from reading the official
documents were publicly debated. What we witnessed is that the official
archive can work to incite violence as it relies on uncontextualized and
state-based or colonially selected information. In contrast, the exhibition
attempted to seek out justice through providing evidence of collective
historical injuries to be publicly negotiated. Negotiating the archives
and the processes of producing heritage in the ethnographic present,
queried the very evidence base upon which many ‘conventional’ heritage
projects are rooted. Indeed, heritage production is inherently a biased
process. When the archives are being employed to seek justice, or if they
become agents of conflict, then they need to be read within the context
of present-day social dynamics to be understood as heritage. Rather than
beginning with the archive as ‘truth’ and comparing it against contempo-
rary commentary, the methodological approach employed by Travelling
Testimonies inverts conventional narrative construction approaches by
beginning with the concerns of those directly impacted by the conflict
and then employing the archive for dialogical truth seeking.
What became apparent from each donation and the interviews that
articulated archival provenance was that there needed to be action,
justice, and developmental outcomes as a response. Not a single donor
of material to the collection articulated a sense of contentment with
their social, political, or economic position. The common discontent
expressed through their collected memories was directed toward current
government structures as opposed to the colonial administration or the
Toro Kingdom. The heritage making called for change in the present,
not merely an acknowledgment of the past, using archives and associated
testimony as the evidence to instigate a push for change.
Artistic Palimpsests
Artistic production is the focus of this section, providing a counterpoint
to the textual narratives addressed in the previous section on archives.
It illustrates how temporary socially engaged art practices of visual and
performative arts can be layered into the heritage making process during
the exhibition open days. Akachi Ezeigbo’s (2000) discussion of litera-

ture as a means to access justice draws on Soyinka’s (1998) arguments
around artworks as valid registers to both make and understand social
realities. According to Stauffer (2015), trauma experiences often isolate
the survivor and derail access to justice, especially in instances when
acquiring justice is not central to state identity formation. Bringing
together Ezeigbo, Soyinka, and Stauffer, one can argue that art breaks
the doubling cycle of loss: that of the violent event itself as well as that
of the loss that has occurred through national silencing of experiences in
Kasese. Specific examples illustrate an ephemeral and embodied process
and suggest an alternative way of interpreting justice, not as verdict, but
as social contract or as aspirational social change.
The inclusion of contemporary art, processes of artistic production,
and display in the outside courtyard of the Kasese Social Services Centre
that housed the exhibition were intended to abstract the codified narra-
tives within the exhibition space. Visitor-engaged drawings served to
illustrate audience experiences as well as offer opportunities to digest
the often complex and layered material presented within the displays,
(Fig. 3) while dramatic performances both purged narratives of trauma
Fig. 3 Young Kasese resident participates in making a collaborative artwork

after viewing the exhibition (Photo credit: Kara Blackmore, 2014)
286 K. Blackmore
and worked to reproduce traditional Bakonzo identity. Each of the three

guiding visual artists began their ‘residency’ with a tour of the exhibition
and then engaged with their preferred medium of painting, sculpture, or
drawing to begin making reflections in dialogue with audience members.
In some cases, the artists worked to develop artworks in anticipation of
the exhibition.
In Kasese, land mine survivors awaiting their turn to give testimony
in front of the video camera gravitated toward the three artists. Jackson
Bwambale was deep in thought preparing to continue his sketch proposal
for a monument to ‘mark the past in this forgotten district.’ Godwin
Muhindo meanwhile decided to start talking to the waiting women
about their stories. He drew as they narrated. This interaction became
a spontaneous preparation phase for their video testimonials. The char-
coal figures gradually illustrated how land mines maim and kill, how
survivors remember, and how memories can be preserved. Almost like a
comic book with divided sections, one could read the testimony from
left to right, top to bottom, with squared off punctuation in events,
silences, and ruptures. When Muhindo went on to start a second testi-
monial illustration, a visiting woman—who chose to leave her work
anonymous—copied the technique in a parallel process. Throughout
that Friday afternoon Moses, who had his personal archive on display
related to the story abduction at St. John’s Seminary by the Allied Demo-
cratic Forces, sat and watched Muhindo illustrate. Bookending Muhindo
for those moments was an experiential arc disrupting notions of victim
and perpetrator—one individual classified as victim narrated to the artist,
the perpetrator who was also a victim sat in silence, and artistic narratives
carried forensic truth into abstraction.
The untitled artworks sketched during the moments when the
survivor narrated, and ex-combatant listened, are intangible interactions
that making can produce. Charcoal in the above example was seen as
an unthreatening tool with which to share a story without writing down
dates, names, or places. Absent of forensic metadata, in spite of its factual
resonance within the narrator’s body, the art became the negotiating
space for truth telling far from a courtroom. This kind of action chal-
lenges the idea that memory must be encapsulated in a material form
to be transmitted within a community. Rather, the form becomes the
medium of transmission not merely a receptacle for testimony (Buikema

2012). The organic interactions made possible through open unscripted
discussions should be seen as an ideal accompaniment to war histories as
told by their survivors. According to theater theorist Rustom Bharucha,
this kind of interaction enables the ‘modulation of energies’ that creates
a spaces of mediation for truth to become ‘a collective responsibility
in caring for the future of the victims’ (2002: 374). Such a space was
fostered by simply engaging a collective collision between war-affected
people, more precisely, those who were labeled victims and those seen as
perpetrators.
For the painting I’m a U -Gandan, artist David Tugume called on
youth to take turns in groups to paint sketches onto a common
canvas (Fig. 4). He then allowed the piece to dry in the sun near visi-
tors entering and exiting the exhibition. With the addition of each layer,
the piece became more abstract, words, and colors blurring with succes-
sive impressions. The final piece shows strong blocks of mixed colors
with illegible words, saved for a nationalistic reference that shows a clear
interpretation of the juxtaposed conflicts. The work is a clear example
of what Yilmaz (2010: 270) calls the ‘visiting sequence’ of artistic layers
with six levels of interaction between artists, war-affected people, and
Fig. 4 Public artwork ‘I AM U-Gandan’ made in collaboration with exhibition

visitors. Kasese, Uganda (Photo credit: Kara Blackmore, 2014)
288 K. Blackmore
the generation who was as many claimed are ‘learning their history for
the first time.’ This piece is full of empathetic sentiments, making visible
the core of the exhibition narrative, that in some way all Ugandans have
been impacted by war and that the struggle for peace is part of a national
healing process.
Exhibition displays were void of images that represented the human
body suffering. In this way, donors to the collection and exhibition
advisors refused to create ‘abject artefacts’ (Hughes 2003) out of their
experiences. As Hughes (2003) has argued, images divorced from their
context and consumed by spectators gazing onto trauma do not advance
justice. Creating an exhibition that showcases images of passive bodies
in pain, would according to Staffuer (2015), increase the loneliness
by demobilizing the collective experience of being affected by war.
The performances of drama, dance, and music by the Kasese National
Women’s Exchange sometimes reenacted bodily trauma by making space
to move through the narrative, constantly reformulating the aesthetic
outlet of heritage transmission. The members have created an alliance
bounded by the shared loss of family members to the ADF conflict
and a commitment to expressing a communal resilience. Onlookers
were drawn in by the dramatic cries reproduced to recall moments of
mourning. Yet their ability to arrest the audiences was transformed into
a kind of rejoicing in the finality of each dramatic rendition, so much
so that many audience members sought out the opportunity to change
their own position from static onlooker to a participating dancer.
Within the courtyard—demonstrative drama presided over the three-
acre plot that once served as an IDP camp—visitors and creators worked
to make real-time palimpsests. In this way, drama, testimony, and visual
art simultaneously built a dialogue. Bajec (2018) claims that this type
of collective performance of solidarity is a counter monument, working
as a marker of heritage, while rejecting the desire to be claimed by an
official discourse. Critiquing how people should perform traumatic expe-
riences and a refusal to be merely a spectator or performer can be read as
an expression rooted in aesthetic togetherness and projecting into aspi-
rations of justice as agreement. According to Papastergiadis and Lynn
(2014: 226), ‘the ubiquity of images and the enhanced public participa-
tion has not only disrupted the conventional categories for defining the
agency of the artist and opened up the meaning of collective authorship,

it also underscores the necessity to rethink the function of the imagina-
tion as a world-making process.’ Returning to the theoretical framework
of aesthetic justice, it is plausible that the kind of world being made
through these interactions is one that aspires to be just, whether or not
the perpetrators are present to witness the testimonial performances.
Caught among the making processes, it is almost impossible to not
recognize the optimism of those engaged who feel that they are working
against injustice, however, politically or developmentally motivated.
Conclusion: Temporary Transitions

The contemporary making of the postwar Rwenzururu in the region
of Kasese is permeated with everyday experiences of heritage or lega-
cies related to the postwar context. The exhibition Travelling Testimonies,
as a transitional justice intervention by the Refugee Law Project, acted
as a kind of micro-intervention into this heritage through the use of
objects, personal archives, negotiated official archives, performances, and
artworks. The interactions that transpired during a series of exhibition
days at different locations, extended into collections, conversation, and
future exhibitions that are ongoing. This emergent heritage captured by
this process is not isolated within the Rwenzori memoryscape, rather
through the National Memory and Peace Documentation Centre and
the programming of Refugee Law Project’s Conflict, Governance, and
Transitional Justice, the narrative forms donated in Kasese have reached
other war-affected regions. Through the forms of archive and artwork,
both literal and abstracted narratives of past conflicts came to the fore.
By participating, the collection donors, performers, artists, and audi-
ences collaborated with the curatorial and documentary team to produce
a heritage in the making. The aspirational nature of such heritage
production works against normative notions of law-making and justice,
that prevail in development discourse, and work to suggest alterna-
tive moral agreements rooted in participation, listening, and individual
contributions.
290 K. Blackmore
One cannot divorce this kind of heritage making from the ideological
tenants of Christianity and liberal peacebuilding efforts that are predi-
cated on the externalization of memory as a tool for molding democratic
and reconciled societies which are believed to be essential pre-requisites
for (sustainable) development. What this case study does offer is a
glimpse into the kinds of social contracts negotiated through exhibition
processes. Whether it be the individual responsibility for archival produc-
tion, access, and interpretation, or the performative collaboration in
artistic propositions, there is a shift to move away from state-centric top-
down efforts for nation building. Justice in this sense is not found alone
in the jurisprudence of courts, tribunals, institutional reform, or even
state acknowledgment of historical injuries. With an ongoing struggle, a
king on trial for treason (who if found convicted is punishable by death),
and only glimpses of peace within living memory(ies), Kasese residents
presented a strong, if only temporary, commitment to transformation.
While the project was funded by an international aid organization (the
Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development and the Democratic
Governance Facility) and all the NGOs involved received support from
European or American donors, the performance of symbolic repair in
Kasese was distinctly for a local audience. Perhaps something to be
gleaned from this is that Kasese’s burgeoning sense of justice could be
projected onto or interface with the state once it has received an internal
reckoning. Here there is a recognition (particularly within the context
of the ADF) that ones’ own people committed atrocities, and that the
Rwenzururu movement for independence failed. There is no lasting
monument, no commodification of trauma into tourist attractions, only
the collaborative making process and the materials that now are part
of the RLP collection. Yet, as contributors to the volume Reclaiming
Heritage (De Jong and Rowlands 2007) assert, understanding the intan-
gible realms of heritage is essential if we are to break the frames that have
been bound by external understandings of conservation, monuments,
and symbolic space.
This chapter has tried to present both methodological (exhibition
making) and theoretical (aesthetic justice) contributions to the relation-
ship between heritage and development. The case of Kasese presents
a context unlike those addressed in much of the heritage literature. It
is characterized by an ongoing conflict, the absence of formal justice

processes, the presence of perpetrators at the highest levels of govern-
ment, an almost complete lack of state support for memory work,
donor-driven peacebuilding efforts in spite of state selective amnesia, a
memoryscape almost void of tangible markers to past violence, and a
largely grassroots set of efforts to preserve its conflict heritage. Yet, the
situation of Uganda as a multi-ethnic and conflict-affected nation that is
dominated by the public commemoration of liberation narratives and the
simultaneous silencing of the disquiet caused by civil unrest is not unique
to the region. Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia,
and South Sudan all experience similar dynamics. It is in these contexts
that an approach to exhibition making as temporary spaces to create
moments of justice can be meaningful. It remains our task, however, as
exhibition makers to work over time for a better understanding of the
long-term impact of our interventions. If, as this chapter has done, one
advocates for temporary or semi-tangible processes of memorialization,
then critical heritage research will have to support a space for analysis
that can make sense of what happens in the production of memorials as
much as it has done in looking at the final products.
Policy Suggestions
1. Heritage practitioners and donors should consider weighting invest-
ments in memorial heritage to favor production over product.
2. Those charged with the responsibility of memorial production should
investigate existing local memorial practices before sanctioning or
reproducing the ‘global’ (read Euro-American) model.
3. Memorial producers should record and critically interrogate inten-
tionality during the ‘making’ processes.
Notes
1. This was a British Empire regiment comprised of subjects primarily from
present day Uganda and Kenya.
292 K. Blackmore
2. Here the term post-conflict relates to the end of war, genocide or author-
itarian regimes that caused mass causalities. I recognize that other forms
of violence can and do persist even after the state or rebel sponsored
killings have ended. See Dacia Viejo Rose 2013 for discussion on issues
of post-conflict.
3. A version of this can be found at the US Institute of Peace online, https://
www.usip.org/publications/1974/06/truth-commission-uganda-74
4. Complimentarily refers to a domestic trial that relates to the countries that
have cases held in an international court or tribunal.
5. The combatants fought to avoid being subsumed into the kingdom of Toro
by the colonial administration.
6. See Derek Peterson’s description from the University of Michigan at https://
derekrpeterson.com/archive-work/.
7. For a more detailed description of the UPPC read, http://www.monitor.
co.ug/artsculture/Reviews/Government--printer-lies--ruins---street--publis
hers/691232-2646306-oae8bbz/index.html.
8. Interview with ADF returnee, Joram.
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Modern Nostalgias for Sovereignty
and Security: Preserving Cultural Heritage
for Development in Eritrea
Christoph Rausch
The Modern Architectural Heritage of Asmara

In the late 1980s, the World Bank announced that it would adopt a
‘holistic approach’ to development and subsequently turned its attention
to cultural heritage as a tool in what it called ‘post-conflict reconstruc-
tion, nation building, economic development and poverty reduction’
(Duer 1999; Wolfensohn 2001). The Bank considered Eritrea a ‘natural
experiment’ in which to test this new approach (Kreimer et al. 1998).
In 1993, Eritrea declared its independence from Ethiopia after decades
of violent conflict, making it one of the youngest nation-states on the
African continent. A symbol of Eritrea’s newly won sovereignty is its
capital, Asmara. The city remained virtually undamaged throughout
Eritrea’s long struggle for national independence, as well as during
C. Rausch (B)
Humanities and Social Sciences, University College Maastricht, Maastricht,
The Netherlands
e-mail: christoph.rausch@maastrichtuniversity.nl

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_11
298 C. Rausch
another war between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1998. Largely built under
Italian colonialism, Asmara survives as an ensemble of early twentieth-
century modern architecture and urban planning that was inscribed to
the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017 (UNESCO 2017).
In this chapter, I examine the heritage valorization of Asmara’s modern
architecture. Based on multi-sited anthropological fieldwork conducted
for my PhD research, I describe the practices of relevant state and
non-state actors that, I argue, raise a number of significant questions
concerning norms and forms of government today. I ask how the modern
architectural heritage of Asmara is instrumental both to the Eritrean
government and to transnational organizations, but for different reasons
and to different ends. My analysis indicates how the dictatorial Eritrean
government crucially depends on the appropriation of the modern archi-
tecture of Asmara as national heritage to ensure a re-territorialization of
its sovereignty along the lines of its former Italian colonial borders with
Ethiopia. The Eritrean government’s dominant concern with political
and economic sovereignty, however, is compromised of the conditions
of a World Bank loan for the preservation of Asmara’s modern heritage.
In turn, the Eritrean quest for self-reliance at all costs, including serious
human rights violations, disappoints the World Bank’s high hopes of
post-conflict reconstruction, nation building, economic development,
and poverty reduction through cultural heritage preservation. Surpris-
ingly though, ‘failure’ seems to be irrelevant to a positive assessment of
the project, as well as the further promotion of culture-bound devel-
opment aid to Eritrea. In fact, after the end of the World Bank’s
engagement, the European Union delegation continued to refer to the
modern heritage of Asmara as a resource for the EU’s overall develop-
ment program to improve food security and to contain emigration in
the Horn of Africa.
In my conclusion, I point out relevant conflicts of interests and claim
firstly that they need to be better acknowledged, secondly that they point
toward pitfalls for the preservation of cultural heritage for development
in general, and thirdly that nostalgia is a bad policy advisor. Indeed, I
argue that it is invariably forms of modern nostalgia that determine the
policies of transnational development organizations such as the World
Bank and the EU delegation, as well as those of the Eritrean national
Modern Nostalgias for Sovereignty and Security … 299
government. Considering the resonance of Asmara’s image portrayed in

popular exhibitions and documentary movies as ‘Africa’s secret modernist
city’ and a ‘City of Dreams,’ I claim that different notions of nostalgia
for colonial modernities revolving around Asmara’s modern architectural
heritage problematize norms and forms of government in terms of the
politics of sovereignty and security.
Politics of Sovereignty and Security

Following the work of Michel Foucault, I consider politics to be the
situated practices through which existing governmental rationalities are
reflected upon and transformed. Foucault situates his account of the
transformation of modern governmental reason in the social environ-
ment of the town (Foucault 2007). Drawing on Foucault, Paul Rabinow
has shown how modern government is intricately intertwined with inno-
vative technologies of social regulation through urban planning and
modern architecture. Rabinow extends Foucault’s somewhat Eurocentric
scope by zooming in on urbanization in France’s North African colonies
(Rabinow 1989). He argues that the French colonies ‘constituted a labo-
ratory of experimentation for new arts of government capable of bringing
a modern and healthy society into being’ (ibid.: 289). As part of the
military project to guarantee France’s sovereign rule of an expanded terri-
tory, the colonial built environment was developed to effectively rule
over a population. Based on the ideologies of progress and development
and through the organization of urban space in its territories abroad,
the French state developed the norms and forms of its social modernity
(ibid.).
Rabinow’s analysis of colonial politics as a productive tension between
governmental rationalities of sovereignty and security that is manifested
in the modern built environment is supported by a number of other
scholars (e.g., compare: AlSayyad 1992; Vale 1992; Hosagrahar 2005).
Mia Fuller notably applies Rabinow’s findings to her study of Italian
colonialism, indicating how the Italian colonial government fundamen-
tally relied on theories and practices of modern architecture and urban
300 C. Rausch
planning, particularly under Mussolini’s fascist rule. Among other exam-

ples, she analyzes the urban development of Asmara between 1898 and
1941, the period when it was the capital of the Italian colony of Eritrea
(Fuller 2007).
Initially, Asmara consisted of little more than a number of Italian mili-
tary installations, with a colonial settlement which grew into a small
town by the 1920s. In the 1930s, Asmara experienced a building boom
as Italy invested heavily in Eritrea’s infrastructure. This boom was linked
to Mussolini’s preparations to invade neighboring Ethiopia, which after
a massive European ‘scramble for Africa’ remained the only independent
kingdom on the continent (Pakenham 1992). Regarded at the time as
being based upon an imperial model, Asmara’s subsequent urban growth
was regulated according to a fascist master plan meant to control ‘all
that concerns the organization of a population’s life’ (Fuller 2007: 141).
This master plan decreed the separation of living areas for colonizers and
colonized, who were thought to form distinctly separate civilizations.
In fact, while the architects and planners of Asmara believed that ‘the
native must join his new nation,’ he or she was explicitly not considered
part of Italian civil society. Rather, the subjection of ‘the natives’ to the
colonizers’ sovereign power was taken for granted; in the colony, they
were considered ‘a guest rather than a former master’ (ibid.: 138–142).
The disciplinary design of Asmara’s urban grid according to strict princi-
ples of racial, ethnic, and religious segregation thus confirms a particular
tension between governmental rationalities of sovereignty and security,
especially against the backdrop of Mussolini’s colonial policy of territo-
rial expansion. As Fuller puts it, the Italians wanted to ‘have their cake
and eat it too, controlling the colonized while imagining themselves as
both beneficent and beloved’ (ibid.: 144; also compare: Makki 2008).
Today, the Eritreans have inherited Asmara’s modern architecture and
many Asmarinos live and work in their former colonizers’ houses and
offices, or alternatively in the slums of the former indigenous zones.
No changes to the urban makeup of Asmara were made when Eritrea
became a British protectorate following the 1941 defeat of the Italians
in the Second World War. After the UN proposed a contested feder-
ation between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1950, the long Eritrean War of
Independence (1961–1991) prohibited any major urban development
of Asmara. The only visible alterations to Asmara’s street views concern

the walls around properties, which many owners raised for reasons of
privacy and safety during the Ethiopian occupation. For a large part, the
modern architectural heritage of Asmara thus continues to represent early
twentieth-century Italian colonial urbanism. But what happens when,
as is the case with the heritage valorization of the modern architecture
of Asmara, political practices are tested over the built environment of a
colonial past?
A Global Heritage Assemblage Around

the Modern Architecture of Asmara
Development organizations in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s
moved toward what was called a holistic approach to development. In
this policy shift, ‘culture’ was deemed essential. UNESCO even declared
1988–1997 the ‘World Decade for Cultural Development,’ asserting that
‘from now on, culture should be regarded as a direct source of inspiration
for development, and in return, development should assign to culture a
central role as social regulator’ (Duer 1999: 21). When James D. Wolfen-
sohn was appointed president of the World Bank in 1995, he continued
to endorse a similar view. Wolfensohn reflected on the role of the World
Bank by stating that ‘[we need to do] development differently’ and that
‘we must not lose sight of culture and cultural heritage’ (2001: 15). He
commissioned a framework for action on culture and sustainable devel-
opment, personally chairing a working group with what Arlene Fleming,
a senior heritage consultant to the World Bank, calls the qualities of an
encouraging believer (Fleming 2010). Apparently, Wolfensohn’s policy
objective was ‘to mainstream culture into Bank operations’ (Picciotto
2001: 6).
Seeking partnerships with cultural heritage organizations such as
UNESCO, the World Bank started lending ‘specifically for culture’ in
the late 1990s (Duer 1999). This was facilitated mainly through so-
called Learning and Innovation Loans (LILs), which were meant to
‘afford opportunities to test new approaches, pilot efforts for later expan-
sion, and develop programmatic strategies’ (Picciotto 2001). Wolfensohn
302 C. Rausch
maintained that investment in culture makes ‘sound business sense. From

tourism to restoration, investments in cultural heritage and related indus-
tries promote labour intensive economic activities that generate wealth
and income’ (Duer 1999: 7). He regarded it as imperative that ‘when the
World Bank supports conservation of monuments and heritage sites it is
to achieve economic and social objectives’ (Duer 1999: 8).
At the same time as the World Bank included culture in its develop-
ment policy, it also claimed it was stepping up its ‘work on post-conflict
situations’ (Kreimer et al. 1998: 6). In 1998, it emphasized that ‘the Bank
has a critical role to play in the early stages of post-conflict reconstruc-
tion’ (Kreimer et al. 1998: xii). In fact, the relevant World Bank report
on experience with post-conflict reconstruction established an essential
link between peace and development, assuming that ‘in post-conflict
countries sustained peace is essential to sustained development’ where
‘broad-based development in its own right also contributes to sustain-
able peace’ (Kreimer et al. 1998: 21). The report expounds that ‘Culture
is not a luxury’ in post-conflict situations, asking: ‘What is the justifica-
tion for assisting in the protection and conservation of cultural heritage
in situations of complex emergencies?’ and explaining:
Applying scarce resources to conserving cultural heritage in a post-conflict

situation may seem frivolous at first glance. However, cultural heritage has
the power to inspire hope and remind people of their creativity. [It can
be] viewed as integral to the transition from war to sustainable peace and
as a prerequisite for economic and social development. (Kreimer et al.
1998: 32)
The same World Bank report on post-conflict reconstruction and devel-

opment prominently refers to Eritrea as a case study. Simultaneously with
the publication of this report, the World Bank encouraged the Eritrean
government to apply for a Learning and Innovation Loan in order to
develop its Cultural Assets Rehabilitation Project [CARP], which was
targeted at the modern architectural heritage of Asmara. The Bank
welcomed the Eritrean request, which, it stated, ‘comes coincident with
the progress which is being made in launching post-conflict activities
which are oriented toward economic reconstruction and recovery, and
other social and economic programs with poverty reduction objectives’

(Dewees 2001). However, work on the specifics of a loan application for
CARP began shortly before a renewed war between Eritrea and Ethiopia
started in 1998, which led to a waning image of Eritrea as a model newly
independent state and halted development activities until 2001. Only
then was CARP finally launched with a loan of $5 million (Dewees 2001;
Fleming 2010).
Naigzy Gebremedhin, a former employee of the UN Environment
Programme, coordinated CARP together with a steering committee
formally placed under the Eritrean Ministry of Finance, but initially
operating relatively autonomously. From the World Bank’s side, Arlene
Fleming took over as World Bank Task Team Leader from Peter Dewees,
who had initiated the project together with Naigzy Gebremedhin before
the war. Fleming had a record as a consultant in cultural heritage policy-
making and emphasized the value of the Learning and Innovation Loan,
which according to her ‘for the Bank is small, but for the cultural heritage
field is enormous’ (Fleming 2010). Moreover, Fleming recognized a
pattern in the use of World Bank LILs for cultural heritage:
What is interesting to mention is that these small loans for cultural

heritage tended to be taken, not entirely, but frequently by countries
who were newly free, newly independent. For instance, there was one in
Georgia, one in Romania, there was one in Eritrea; Azerbaijan, also. So,
you see that these countries have a particular interest in developing aware-
ness and attending to their own cultural heritage, which had not been
possible under the previous regimes. And that I think was an interesting
feature, which is not often mentioned. (Fleming 2010)
Besides attempting to generate economic development through cultural

heritage by financing CARP, the World Bank also clearly supported an
attempt to ‘re-establish Eritrea’s identity,’ as Naigzy Gebremedhin puts it
(Gebremedhin 2009).
Gebremedhin’s ambition to forge Eritrea’s national identity through
the valorization of its modern built heritage coincided with a rising
interest in Africa’s colonial architecture among global heritage orga-
nizations. In 2001, for instance, the very year, CARP was launched,
304 C. Rausch
ICOMOS published a report which labeled modern architecture in

Africa a ‘shared colonial heritage at risk’ (ICOMOS 2001). The report
urged the inventorying and protection of modern heritage in Africa,
suggesting joint responsibilities for former colonizers and the colonized
alike. Moreover, ICOMOS in 2004 presented an advisory report to
UNESCO entitled Filling the Gaps: An Action Plan for the Future,
identifying modern architecture in Africa as a category of heritage
that combines some of the thematic and regional shortcomings of the
UNESCO World Heritage List (Jokiletho 2004).
Against the backdrop of a concept of shared heritage which started
being referred to more frequently by heritage professionals following
the initial 2001 ICOMOS publication, CARP’s focus on Asmara’s colo-
nial architecture proved a powerful means to create international interest
in the newly independent state of Eritrea. Realizing this potential, one
of Gebremedhin’s first decisions as CARP manager was to hire foreign
consultants Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, a British-Chinese
couple with a background in design, who had travelled extensively in
Eritrea in the years before (Gebremedhin 2009).
Gebremedhin, Denison, and Ren started to work vigorously in order
to raise international awareness of Asmara’s modern heritage, even
though this was not a primary objective of CARP under the specifi-
cations of the World Bank loan. One result was that the UNESCO
World Heritage Centre chose Asmara as the venue for the 2004 regional
meeting of its Modern Heritage Programme (van Oers 2004). UNESCO
considered modern heritage in Africa ‘a [vulnerable] source of iden-
tity and economic development’ (van Oers 2004: 1, 3). During the
conference in Asmara, UNESCO encouraged a tentative World Heritage
listing of Asmara’s ‘historic perimeter,’ which Denison and Ren wrote
and submitted to UNESCO on behalf of CARP in 2005. Their entry
describes Asmara as the ‘most concentrated and intact assemblage of
Modernist architecture anywhere in the world’ (UNESCO 2005; van
Oers 2010; Denison 2009).
In 2003, Denison, Ren, and Gebremedhin co-authored Asmara: The
Secret Modernist City. In Denison’s words, this book was meant to
‘get this material into the international domain, to celebrate Asmara’
(Denison 2009). Based on research conducted for CARP, the book
advertises a ‘sublime urban environment that has miraculously survived

to the present day’ and refers to a ‘definite urgency in extolling Asmara’s
beauty’ (Denison et al. 2003: 17). In fact, Asmara: The Secret Modernist
City reads like a call for support. The mayor of Asmara, for instance,
writes in his foreword:
Eritreans are able to present to the world a heritage that is worthy of

international acclaim and of which they should all be proud. This book
therefore appeals to all Eritreans to offer an unending commitment to
future generations that this legacy is preserved and to rise to the chal-
lenge of nurturing and involving themselves in the positive development
of their capital, which will serve to make it one of the world’s most atmo-
spheric, interesting and, importantly, safe cities. With an agenda based
firmly on the needs of the Eritreans, including the alleviation of poverty
and nurturing a balanced and equitable society, we are seeking to achieve
these aims. Therefore, I call upon individuals, communities and orga-
nizations, domestic and international, to collaborate in achieving these
aims, and to assure that it is not only Asmara’s fascinating history that is
recognized, but also its bright future. (Denison et al. 2003: 11)
This rhetoric combined with the aesthetic appeal of the highly visual
content of Asmara: The Secret Modernist City can explain why Roxanne
Hakim, Arlene Fleming’s successor as World Bank Task Team Leader for
CARP in 2006, claims that the book ‘single-handedly brought Asmara
on [to] the international agenda’ (Hakim 2010).
Indeed, CARP capitalized on the popular reception of the book to
drum up support. According to Hakim, the generation of an image
of Asmara as ‘Africa’s secret modernist city’ made CARP ‘fantastic with
partners’:
I’ve never seen a World Bank project that partnered so much with other
organizations. The Alliance Française, a little NGO somewhere, the Ital-
ians, this project really did well in this respect. […] CARP began to be
seen as a body in Eritrea, which was a state channel to put your money
in if you wanted to support culture. […] This project, the topic, the
sector we worked in; every kind of embassy in a country has a little
fund somewhere, the sole aim of which is to do little stuff like this.
306 C. Rausch
[…] Now suddenly that pot of money found this huge bandwagon to
jump on. […]. Because [CARP] provided a structure and while not many
government institutions were very efficient it had already identified things
worthwhile to do. (Hakim 2010)
Effectively then, CARP facilitated the creation of what I call a global

heritage assemblage around the modern architecture of Asmara. In my
book Global Heritage Assemblages, Development and Modern Architecture
in Africa, from which this chapter is adapted, I develop my concep-
tion of global heritage assemblages at length (Rausch 2017: 14–17). I
define the global heritage assemblage around the modern architecture
of Asmara as administrative apparatuses, technical infrastructures, and
value regimes that revolve around contested notions of cultural heritage,
which—despite being deeply and historically entwined with nation-
building projects—begin to transcend the actual borders and categories
of the nation-state (Rausch 2017: 15). CARP’s mission of the ‘reestab-
lishment of Eritrean national identity’ was merged with the transnational
appeal of Asmara’s historic perimeter as shared colonial heritage and
the city’s tentative UNESCO World Heritage status. CARP’s conspic-
uous emphasis on the global responsibilities of post-conflict reconstruc-
tion, nation building, economic development, and poverty reduction,
however, stirred opposition from the Eritrean government.
Asserting Sovereignty and Security

While widely being recognized as having brought CARP’s activities to the
attention of a global audience, Asmara: The Secret Modernist City was not
officially endorsed by the Eritrean government. In fact, the government’s
reactions to the publication of the book revealed a fundamental opposi-
tion to CARP’s policy of creating a global sense of a shared ownership
of Asmara’s modern architectural heritage. Eager to assert its newly won
national sovereignty and in pursuit of a radical policy of self-reliance, the
Eritrean government censored the book and, shortly after its publication,
cracked down on CARP’s rallying of international assistance.
The Eritrean government’s suspicion was not limited to CARP and

generally affected any foreign intervention at the time. Whereas in the
early 1990s, Eritrea was viewed as ‘the darling of the western world’
(Denison 2009), over time its authorities became more and more appre-
hensive about foreign influence. From the late 1990s onward, according
to a high-ranking foreign diplomat in Eritrea, this made it increasingly
difficult for development organizations to work in Eritrea (Anonymous
2010a). The German GTZ, the World Food Programme, and USAID all
left the country because of Eritrean obstructions. Moreover, the number
of NGOs active in Eritrea sharply decreased from 38 in 1993 to three
in 2010. Even UNMEE, the UN peacekeeping mission installed after
the 1998 war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, was forced to leave in 2008.
First, the Eritrean government withheld its gas to fuel its vehicles on
account of alleged lack of gas supplies, and then, when the mission’s
equipment had been exchanged for diesel-fuelled cars, the Eritreans
pretended there was a diesel shortage. ‘Having been UNMEEed’ has
become a standing expression among diplomatic personnel in Asmara
to refer to the blunt expulsion of the UN mission when describing
one’s own experiences of the Eritrean government’s indirect but effective
sanctions against aid work (Anonymous 2010a).
Apparently, the publication of Asmara: The Secret Modernist City was
reason enough to lead the Eritrean government to ‘UNMEE’ CARP
until the termination of the World Bank loan in 2007. The World Bank
Implementation Completion and Results Report about CARP, published
in 2008, describes in diplomatic language how in the later phase of
the project ‘there were difficulties in reaching decisions in a timely
manner on some key matters’ with an ‘ambivalent’ government (World
Bank 2008: 22). CARP activities were delayed or otherwise subjected to
‘changing and unpredictable government priorities’ (ibid.). According to
the Bank, the premises upon which the project was designed to achieve
economic development and poverty reduction changed drastically as a
result of ‘the changing political environment in Eritrea’ (ibid.: 28). Orig-
inally, the World Bank’s objectives for CARP established a crucial link
between the preservation of the historic built environment of Asmara
and economic growth. Among the so-called key indicators was a ‘growth-
oriented planning process for urban and architectural management and
308 C. Rausch
conservation’ and a ‘conservation fund […] designed to stimulate the

private sector and to engage communities’ (ibid.: 2). Furthermore, the
World Bank assumed that ‘low-income groups [would be] targeted for
training in specialized building trades related to conservation’ and that
the ‘conservation of priority sites in Asmara [… would be] completed
with a particular emphasis on improving community access to public
services and spaces’ (ibid.: 2). However, the Bank observed ‘three main
shifts […] in government orientation that affected the project activi-
ties and achievement of development objectives’ (ibid.: 8). These main
shifts compromised the initial key indicators regarding the preservation
of Asmara’s modern architecture, none of which were satisfactorily met,
according to the Bank’s final CARP evaluation.
The first political shift identified by the World Bank concerns the
private sector, which was deemed crucial in attaining CARP’s poverty
reduction and growth objectives. The Eritrean government is reported to
have ‘eliminated or greatly reduced’ activities ‘in support of the private
sector’ (ibid.: 8). The Eritrean Conservation Fund [ECF], which was
to enable private owners of real estate in Asmara to engage in neces-
sary maintenance and conservation works and was designed to ‘ensure
a healthy post-Project afterlife’ (ibid.) of CARP, has yet to be estab-
lished. According to the World Bank, ‘it is unclear when or if the ECF
will become operational through a legal proclamation, in part due to
the Government’s declining support of the private sector’ (ibid.: 13).
Meanwhile, an official from the Eritrean Department of Infrastructure
euphemistically sums up government policy as a
… sort of embargo of building permits: for the past 10 years we didn’t

issue permits for new building construction. We tell the applicants: please
wait until guidelines are fully established, for example the appropriate
height of buildings. There is a great awareness of the heritage among
the Eritreans. People are very cooperative. Many people are suspending
their projects, because they want to wait until decisions have been made.
(Anonymous 2010b; also compare DOI 2006)
The Eritrean government has effectively halted private building activity

on the pretext of cultural heritage preservation.
The second political shift the World Bank notes is that throughout the
loan period for CARP ‘the scope to work with community groups was
greatly restricted’ (World Bank 2008: 8). For instance, while according
to Fleming the ‘empowerment of local people’ was high on CARP’s
agenda and ‘there was a lot of attention in the early phases of the project
to citizen involvement and creating enthusiasm among the people who
owned property in Asmara,’ later this came to a halt. She claims ‘no
one really knew why, but the assumption was that the order came from
the very top. They didn’t want this in Eritrea, this citizen engagement,
it had to stop’ (Fleming 2010). A case in point is the Restore Asmara
Campaign, which gathered Asmarinos for voluntary building conserva-
tion projects. According to the World Bank report, the Restore Asmara
Campaign was ‘a wonderful example of building social capital through
cultural restoration,’ though ‘the stop put to [it] gave a strong message to
the project regarding working directly with community groups’ that the
Eritrean government was opposed to civic engagement around cultural
heritage projects (World Bank 2008: 18).
The third political shift that the World Bank identifies as having
substantially compromised CARP concerns the Eritrean nationalization
of the building trades. According to the World Bank ‘… the withdrawal
of construction contractors’ licenses imposed by the government in the
last few years [resulted] in delays in activities involving civil works, many
of which remained undone at project closure’ (ibid.: 8). What in prac-
tice became a monopoly created by this nationalization clashed with
the procurement rules of the World Bank, which demand competitive
bidding for contracts. As Roxanne Hakim told me:
[The Eritrean] government wanted to see something physical, they

wanted us to restore a building. Now, the purpose behind that was polit-
ical. They wanted to restore Cinema Asmara and Cinema Capitol, but
[we had] a huge, huge problem with procurement. […] So we wasted a
long time. Also, the government didn’t want foreign companies to bid.
(Hakim 2010)
310 C. Rausch
This conflict between the Eritrean policy of state ownership of industries

and the World Bank’s procurement rules concerning construction works
is emblematic of CARP’s failure to satisfy both parties’ interests.
Actually, the World Bank Implementation Completion and Results
report about CARP arrives at a rather damning final evaluation of the
project. The Bank frankly admits that the primary objectives of CARP
were not met to its satisfaction, stating that ‘it is difficult to assess […]
the contribution of cultural assets to economic growth in the present
circumstances of Eritrea’ and that the ‘poverty impacts [of CARP] are
primarily anecdotal’ (World Bank 2008: 17). Furthermore, the World
Bank states that ‘a weak point in the design [of the loan for CARP]
was the underestimation of risks and their mitigation. Several important
risks, especially political risk, were underestimated’ (ibid.: 17). Hakim
explains:
In hindsight I think we really should have taken a step back and taken
a little more drastic look at the design, to see if it would extend into
the new situation. Remember, at the time of [project] design Eritrea was
doing relatively well; 7% GDP [growth], it was a really new country.
When we actually implemented the project; it was after the war, but as
you know the war was still going on. We were coming into a new dictato-
rial government in the country, communist philosophy, no private sector,
not really an environment where creative heritage stuff was a priority.
(Hakim 2010)
The far-reaching conclusion of the World Bank’s CARP report is that ‘in
retrospect, it may have been more realistic to eliminate [emphasis added]
the poverty reduction and growth aspects of the development objective’
(World Bank 2008: 3).
Whereas the World Bank’s evaluation complains about CARP’s failure
to achieve its economic development and poverty reduction objectives,
on another front it credits the project as having positively ‘demonstrated
that investing in cultural assets is an element of nation building […]
and post-conflict reconstruction’ (ibid.). This conclusion is largely based
on CARP’s effects on institutional cooperation and capacity building
in Eritrea, as well as on the Bank’s insight that nationally and glob-
ally the ‘awareness raising on historic architecture [of Asmara] exceeded
expectations’ (ibid.: 17). The World Bank also notes that ‘media atten-
tion on Eritrea’s cultural heritage has created a positive image of Eritrea’
abroad (ibid.: 19). Finally, CARP’s initiative to add Asmara’s historic
perimeter to the tentative UNESCO World Heritage List is credited as a
success. But whereas internationally these events indicate an overwhelm-
ingly positive interest in CARP, domestically they had a rather different
resonance. In fact, the Eritrean government fundamentally contradicts
the World Bank when it comes to its interpretations of nation building
and post-conflict reconstruction through cultural heritage.
A case in point is the Eritrean government’s long-standing unwilling-
ness to further participate in the UNESCO World Heritage program.
The World Bank portrays the drafting of the tentative World Heritage
List entry under CARP as a major achievement and claims that nomi-
nation was slow only because ‘the country lacks legal and management
requirements’ (ibid.: 19). Naigzy Gebremedhin, however, talked about
a conscious decision on the Eritrean government’s part not to officially
nominate Asmara: ‘With the designation as World Heritage Site comes
responsibility. There is an erosion of your sovereignty. […] But Eritreans
are terribly, terribly sensitive about an erosion of their sovereignty. And
they have not yet made an application’ (Gebremedhin 2009). In fact,
after a long moratorium, Asmara was finally inscribed to the UNESCO
World Heritage List in 2017, an inscription which was claimed to present
‘an opportunity to encourage critical reflections on cultural relations
and heritage globally, and to promote stability and prosperity locally’
(Denison et al. 2017: 12). However, the Eritrean government’s long
hesitation about having the historic perimeter of Asmara listed as a
World Heritage Site was an act of defiance against the ‘shared’ global
responsibilities for Asmara’s modern architectural heritage. Their stalling
denotes fundamental tensions between the assertion of national politics
of sovereignty on the one hand and transnational appeals to post-conflict
reconstruction, nation building, economic development, and poverty
reduction on the other.
Above all, the Eritrean dictatorial regime valorizes Asmara’s modern
heritage with fervent nationalism and a calculated vision of political
and economic self-determination, using the architectural heritage to
312 C. Rausch
ensure its national sovereignty very pragmatically. During my fieldwork

in Asmara, I interviewed Samson Haile from the Eritrean Ministry of
Information about his government’s policy concerning Asmara’s modern
heritage. Haile’s answers betray an understanding of cultural heritage
as crucial for the establishment of Eritrean national sovereignty as he
quickly referred to the many martyrs of war as a reminder of the ‘impor-
tance of preserving Eritrea’s independence’ and continuously emphasized
an imperative for Eritrean ‘self-reliance,’ always with an eye on the
ongoing conflict with Ethiopia (Haile 2010). After all, the authority
of the Eritrean government depends on this conflict as it provides
President Isaias with an excuse to neither pass the democratic constitu-
tion nor hold democratic elections (O’Kane and Redeker-Hepner 2009;
Redeker-Hepner 2009).
Whereas the World Bank complains about lost chances to ensure
economic development and poverty reduction through cultural heritage
preservation, Haile displayed a certain cynicism, maintaining that ‘we
can be hungry, but we will work for Eritrea’ (Haile 2010). He claimed
that his country ‘may be poor economically, but it is rich in social and
cultural values. Life is not only economy. Our community ties, that’s
what makes us strong’ (Haile 2010). Yet Haile’s community ties have
been put under strain by the current circumstances in Eritrea, a country
which, analysts warn, continues to be threatened by food crises (UN
WFP 2017). Because of hunger and widespread poverty, more and more
young Eritreans choose to leave their country, a trend which is reflected
in the current European migrant crisis. An additional reason for emigra-
tion is government repression. For example, the National Service, which
is mandatory from the age of 18 to 40 and likened by a highly ranked
foreign diplomat in Asmara, as well as by Human Rights Watch, to a
form of slave labor (Anonymous 2010c; Human Rights Watch 2009).
Although Haile has nothing but disdain for ‘those who flee to Europe,’
the Eritrean government is obviously hard pressed to appeal for social
cohesion. Little wonder then that Haile claims that ‘every Eritrean should
be proud of Asmara’ and that the Eritrean government employs cultural
heritage to instill a sense of national obligation (Haile 2010).
The call to preserve Asmara’s modern architectural heritage has
effectively provided the Eritrean government with concrete means to
discretely exercise disciplinary power domestically. For instance, the

government launched an orchestrated press campaign to reduce the
height of walls around private houses in Asmara. According to Samson
Haile, who has published a book about Asmara’s modern heritage in
Tigrinya, the local language, of which he claims 5000 copies have been
distributed in Eritrea:
Asmara is an open city, so walls should only be 1,20m high. The 1938
master plan dictates this. During the Ethiopian period, walls were height-
ened for security because everybody was being killed. The government is
now urging to abolish the walls. In my book and in other media we
are campaigning for the reduction of the heights of walls. I devote one
chapter to this in my book. […] If they want privacy, they should plant
hedges. (Haile 2010)
Whereas Haile advertises lowering the walls for the sake of preserving
the colonial built environment of Asmara, a main goal of his campaign
is clearly to assist in the rounding up of ‘draft dodgers’ (BBC 1999).
Indeed, the Eritrean government enforces National Service participation
with frequent and orchestrated raids throughout the city, known as gffa.
The Cultural Secretary of the Eritrean People’s Front for Democracy
and Justice, Zemeret Yohannes, states that ‘when our young people are
defending our country, it is morally and socially unacceptable to hide
from the duty of citizenship’ (ibid.). During gffa, though, it is common
to hide to avoid arrest ‘until the provisional prisons – police stations,
cinemas, backyards, and sometimes the stadium – are crowded’ (Treiber
in O’Kane and Redeker-Hepner 2009: 97). Seen against this backdrop,
the campaign to reduce the height of walls plays into the hands of the
Eritrean government.
In this context, Haile’s reference to Asmara as an ‘open city’ retains
a very different connotation than the expressed hope of Guang Yu Ren
and Edward Denison in Asmara: The Secret Modernist City that Eritrea
would become more ‘open to the world.’ It is clear that the Eritrean
government means to do the opposite, doing all it can to close Eritrea
from the world. Until this day, Asmara: The Secret Modernist City is not
available for sale in Eritrea and the book’s censorship perfectly illustrates
314 C. Rausch
Eritrea’s continuous ranking as the very lowest country on the World

Press Freedom Index, behind North Korea (Reporters Without Borders
2017).
The Eritrean government thus coordinates the preservation of
Asmara’s architectural heritage while violating fundamental human
rights. This puts the World Bank’s admittance of underestimating the
political risk of CARP in a critical light. Indeed, the Bank’s Implementa-
tion Completion and Results report notes:
… in retrospect, the risk assessment [for CARP] was overly optimistic and
should have been Moderate (M) rather than Negligible (N). […] During
implementation […] risk factors [previously not accounted for] seriously
affected [the project’s] implementation [such as a] change in government
support for the involvement of the private sector, a downturn in tourism
as a result of regional instability and border conflict [as well as a] depleting
human resource base with out-migration and army enrolment. (World
Bank 2008: 15)
Such self-reflection has to be taken with a grain of salt. Not least because
overall the World Bank rates CARP ‘MS,’ or moderately satisfactory,
a rating which it claims is ‘fully justified as the project demonstrates
extensive achievements and lessons learned’ (World Bank 2008: 17). In
a strange move, the Bank report maintains that CARP
… clearly contributed to increased recognition of the importance of

cultural heritage in Eritrea. Among other achievements, it has led to
the production of a number of important publications and studies of
Eritrean cultural heritage, particularly related to old districts of Asmara
[…]. These publications and studies have become popular among both
tourists and scholars and have increased awareness of the cultural heritage
of the country. The potential for increased tourism and international
interest in historic sites and local culture provide important oppor-
tunities for building social capital and for contributing to economic
growth. The project has also successfully provoked increased cooperation
among municipalities and other Government bodies, urban planners, the
private sector and cultural heritage professionals […] directed towards the
preservation and protection of cultural heritage of the country. This has
included new zoning and frontage regulations designed to preserve the

historic [perimeter] of Asmara […]. (ibid.: 17)
Knowing just how the Eritrean government responded to the increased

recognition of the importance of cultural heritage, how it censored rele-
vant publications, and how it interpreted the frontage regulations in
terms of its campaign to lower the walls, it is hard not to read the
report with a cynical eye. The World Bank rhetoric of political risk
certainly underplays the Eritrean government’s structural violations of
human rights as a consequence of its radical politics of sovereignty. The
World Bank even lauds the creation of ‘a positive image of Eritrea’ (ibid.:
19) as a result of CARP’s activities, maintaining that CARP, despite its
shortcomings, has shown that ‘culture should be recognized as a unifying
force in a post-conflict situation’ (ibid.: 24). Clearly, such statements play
favorably into the hands of the Eritrean government and what Cultural
Secretary Yohannes calls its ‘propaganda machinery,’ ‘the main element of
[which] is a continuation of the old liberation struggle [against Ethiopia].
It is our heritage’ (Hannan 1999).
In this respect, the global heritage assemblage around the modern
architecture of Asmara appears to be a case in point of what the
anthropologist James Ferguson has called an ‘anti-politics machine.’ For
Ferguson, the anti-politics machine of development depoliticizes ‘every-
thing it touches, everywhere whisking political realities out of sight, all
the while performing, almost unnoticed, its own pre-eminently polit-
ical operation of expanding bureaucratic state power’ (Ferguson 1994:
xv). When the World Bank ignores the political capital that the heritage
valorization of Asmara’s modern heritage creates domestically for the
Eritrean government, this is exactly such an act of de-politicization
through development.
Significantly, however, the heritage valorization of Asmara’s modern
architecture has not just served the Eritrean state well in its politics of
national sovereignty. At a time when according to one foreign diplomat
in Asmara ‘[conducting] development work in Eritrea is like jumping
out of a plane without a parachute’ (Anonymous 2010d), the modern
architectural heritage of Asmara presented an emergent transnational
316 C. Rausch
apparatus of government with a welcome opportunity to justify its

pursuit of the politics of security in the Horn of Africa.
An immediate follow up to the World Bank’s involvement in CARP
is the 2009 European Union delegation’s National Heritage Programme.
Worth e5 million of direct investments in architectural heritage preser-
vation, this program is part of a e120 million development aid package
for Eritrea that mainly focuses on food security and infrastructure. Its
overall goal is ‘to effectively support the ongoing efforts of the Govern-
ment of the State of Eritrea in protecting or rehabilitating Eritrea’s rich
cultural and architectural heritage in order to sustain long term socio-
economic objectives’ (EU Commission Delegation to Eritrea 2009). And
indeed, the 2006 European Union Consensus on Development holds
that ‘economic, social and environmental dimensions of poverty eradi-
cation in the context of sustainable development include many develop-
ment activities’ prominent among which is ‘culture’ (EU Commission
2006).
Like CARP, the EU National Heritage Programme through the aim
of the ‘urban rehabilitation of Eritrea’s capital city’ focuses on Asmara’s
modern heritage (EU Commission Delegation to Eritrea 2009: 3).
With this ambition, the EU delegation explicitly acknowledges the
World Bank’s cautionary Implementation Completion and Results CARP
report. For instance, the Terms of Reference for the National Heritage
Programme warn that ‘lack of assured dialogue and cooperation between
stakeholders could lead to a halt in the urban rehabilitation project’
(EU Commission Delegation to Eritrea 2009: 6). Still, the World Bank
presented CARP as ‘highly relevant’ and ‘good value for money […]
although its implementation was uneven’ (World Bank 2008: 14, 16),
and whether or not CARP yielded measurable economic development
and poverty reduction results seems to be irrelevant to the project in
the short term. Following the World Bank and CARP, the EU delega-
tion to Eritrea with its National Heritage Programme pursues long-term
interests of global governance and politics of security in the Horn of
Africa.
The EU has explicitly committed itself to preventing food shortages
in and to containing migration from Eritrea. Employees of the EU dele-
gation to Eritrea, as well as diplomats from EU member states working
in Asmara, however, doubt whether investment in the modern architec-

tural heritage of their host city is an effective means to secure these aims,
especially with an eye to the government’s policy of self-reliance and its
structural violations of fundamental human rights. My expatriate inter-
viewees in Asmara point out an essential tension between the politics of
sovereignty and security in Eritrea. They describe the Eritrean regime as
fostering a ‘strange national pride, a couleur nationale which is difficult
in an environment of poverty when you should first feed your people.’
They claim that the Eritrean government mistakenly thinks that it is ‘at
the centre of international attention,’ ‘full of conspiracy theories about
everybody who is advocating for its cultural heritage abroad.’ Above
all else though, my contacts spoke of Eritrea as a ‘notoriously unpre-
dictable recipient of aid.’ What then explains the urgency of continued
transnational appeals to the development potential of the valorization of
Asmara’s modern heritage?
Restorative Nostalgia/Reflective Nostalgia

For the World Bank, CARP’s LIL was a relatively small investment. Simi-
larly, for the EU delegation’s development aid to Eritrea, the National
Heritage Programme merely constitutes a ‘non-focal sector.’ Still, the
‘restoration of national heritage’ is said to provide ‘a substantial platform
for European Union visibility in the country’ (EU Commission Delega-
tion to Eritrea 2009: 1). In fact, the delegation considers attention to
cultural heritage particularly attractive for the EU’s image:
The [EU delegation], as a potential lead donor, is ideally positioned to

deliver a flagship project in an internationally renowned setting that other
donors can replicate. Representatives of almost all [EU] member states
in Asmara have expressed an interest in supporting future rehabilita-
tion programmes bi- or multi-laterally if the Heritage Programme proves
successful. This places the [EU] in a unique position of taking the lessons
learnt from [CARP] and assuming a lead role in Eritrea in this sector in
the long term. (EU Commission Delegation to Eritrea 2009: 2)
318 C. Rausch
Apparently, transnational organizations consider Asmara’s reputation as

the ‘City of Dreams’ or ‘Africa’s secret modernist city’ to be a good adver-
tisement for their interventions in Eritrea. Ultimately, both the World
Bank and the European Union delegation crucially rely on a particular
fascination with Asmara in communicating their political engagement in
and with Eritrea.
Among the expatriate community in Eritrea, there seems to be a
personal fascination with Asmara’s modern architectural heritage, and
most believe it is ultimately well equipped to distract from the real
dangers faced by the Eritrean population. Several of my expatriate inter-
viewees in Asmara pointed out the ‘nice atmosphere’ in Asmara. They
claim it explains why for them ‘there is no way around being sympa-
thetic to cultural heritage in this town.’ Unanimously, they considered
Asmara a pleasant and familiar environment and experienced it as safe.
In addition to that, they pointed out Asmara’s ‘Un-Africanness.’ Some
even referred to a certain ‘Europeanness,’ claiming that in Asmara ‘as
Europeans and as Westerners, that’s what we see Europe in Africa, the
West in Africa.’ Also, Asmara: The Secret Modernist City characterizes the
city as a ‘convivial urban idyll.’ Ultimately, this kind of fascination with
the modern architectural heritage of Asmara might go a long way toward
explaining the EU delegation’s decision to launch a CARP follow up.
Off the record, there is great disillusionment among diplomats in
Eritrea, several of whom express the belief that ‘the country really doesn’t
do anything with the potential of the modern heritage of Asmara’ and
that ‘in order to stay in power, the [Eritrean] president needs to obstruct
development.’ Denison, however, told me:
Jesper Pedersen at the EU [in Asmara] initiated the e5 million project.

He felt, I think personally that heritage should be part of these e120
millions [of development aid]. I think he’s right. I think many people
think he’s right. And if the present situation wasn’t as bad with the
Eritrean government I think anyone who’s passionate about this archi-
tecture would accept any money to preserve it. (Denison 2009)
While Denison acknowledges ‘criticism of the e120 million aid package

that it will only serve the [Eritrean] government to stay in power,’ he adds
that ‘the heritage issue doesn’t bother me morally, because I think that
buildings will be around longer than any government’ (Denison 2009).
This statement implies more than a mere downplaying of political
problems, however. When the image of Asmara is that of a ‘Euro-
pean’ colonial city, engagement with its modern heritage under Denison’s
motto that ‘buildings will be around longer than any government’
also betrays a certain nostalgia. According to the comparative litera-
ture scholar Svetlana Boym, ‘nostalgia like progress is dependent on the
modern conception of unrepeatable, irreversible time. […] Nostalgia
remains unsystematic and unsynthesiseable, it seduces, rather than
convinces’ (Boym 2001: 13). Somewhat paradoxically then, for transna-
tional organizations and their staff, the appeal of Asmara’s modern
architectural heritage appears to be rooted in nostalgia for colonial
utopias of progress. Against all odds, there is a belief in the capacity of
cultural heritage, to, though not rapidly, (re-)transform Asmara into a
‘most modern and sophisticated city.’
Nostalgia for colonial Asmara, once claimed to have been ‘the world’s
prime building ground for architectural innovation during the Modernist
Movement’ (UNESCO), may betray a hope that its ‘untouched’ historic
built environment can reconstitute the ‘ideal blank canvas’ allegedly
available to colonial architects in the past. Only this time, Asmara
would be a field of experimentation for transnational organizations
to test out new approaches to economic development, poverty reduc-
tion, nation building, and post-conflict reconstruction through cultural
heritage preservation. Indeed, if Boym understands heritage as ‘institu-
tionalized nostalgia,’ a way of ‘giving shape and meaning to longing’
(Boym 2001: 15), clearly the valorization of Asmara’s modern heritage
institutionalizes a nostalgia for colonialism, a time when the colonial
state introduced the politics of security through modern architecture
and urban planning (Boym 2001: 15, 41). It is telling that the tenta-
tive UNESCO World Heritage List entry of Asmara’s historic perimeter
refers to the colonial era as a time when ‘Italian architects could practice
and realize […] modern ideals’ on an ‘ideal blank canvas,’ transforming
the city ‘from a relatively minor town into Africa’s most modern and
sophisticated city at that time’ (UNESCO 2005).
320 C. Rausch
Guang Yu Ren and Edward Denison’s vision of ‘progress’ for Eritrea

also hinges on colonial nostalgia, as ‘the implications for Eritrea evidently
go far beyond extolling its colonial architectural heritage. The possi-
bilities for all manner of initiatives to encourage development largely
through tourism, awareness and education are now more attainable than
ever before’ (Denison and Ren 2004). Denison admits, ‘it would be
devious for Europeans to just focus on tourism because it is us [Euro-
peans] going there’ (Denison 2009). The fact that Asmara’s modern
heritage is continuously credited with a high potential for international
tourism may be the result of a nostalgia for a colonial ‘age of travel and
adventure […] embodied in [the] new architectural forms of Asmara,’ as
it was literally described in the tentative UNESCO World Heritage List
entry (EU Commission Delegation to Eritrea 2009: 3; UNESCO 2005).
Today, globalization is said to have given rise to a new age of travel,
and for Eritrea, the preservation of Asmara’s colonial built environment
is presented as an opportunity to finally ‘join the rest of the world’—
through tourism and by capitalizing on the link to global resources
initially established by CARP.
The Strategic Urban Development Plan for Asmara, credited as a
major result of CARP and financed by the African Union, for instance,
formulates a future vision under the heading ‘a convivial city, proud of
its heritage’:
In 2025, Asmara is a city which has succeeded in protecting its modern

heritage […] Asmara has managed to place itself on the tourist map of the
sub region. It is widely visited by specialized tours. […] It has managed
to avoid the mass tourism which has proven so destructive of heritage
[elsewhere]. (DUD Ministry of Public Works 2006: 15)
The Heritage and Tourism Strategy expounded in the plan does remark
that a necessary international promotion campaign for tourism to
Asmara can only be realized after ‘the normalization of relations with
neighbouring countries’ (DUD Ministry of Public Works 2006: 22, 23).
That such normalization is not imminent is illustrated by the 2009 UN
Resolution against Eritrea, responding to a threat to international peace
and security because of ‘the ongoing border dispute between Djibouti
and Eritrea, as well as Eritrea’s support of armed groups destabilizing

and undermining peace and reconciliation in Somalia’ (UN 2009). Only
nostalgia for the relative geopolitical stability and global dominance that
allowed for a colonial ‘age of travel and adventure’ on the Horn of Africa
may obscure such realities.
Of course, the Eritrean government indulges in its own version
of colonial nostalgia, one largely opposed to the form informing the
agendas of transnational organizations. After decades of fighting for
national sovereignty and independence from Ethiopia, the Eritrean
regime fundamentally depends on references to Italian colonialism for
its legitimacy. In fact, compared to the hated Ethiopian occupation,
Eritreans regard the Italians as ‘the good colonizers’ (Gebremedhin
2009). After all, the anthropologists David O’Kane and Tricia Redeker-
Hepner note, it was during the period of Italian rule that the Eritrean
population ‘began groping towards a common identity’ (O’Kane and
Redeker-Hepner 2009: xviii). Even if such a common identity was the
result of brutal colonial policies of racial segregation, it did make the
Eritrean pursuit of an independent nation-state possible.
Today, as a legacy of Italian colonialism, Asmara’s modern architectural
heritage stands as a symbol of Eritrea’s cultural and political borders. Not
only do the contested boundaries of today’s Eritrea more or less coincide
with those of the former Italian colony, it is also difficult to establish
differences between Eritrea and its enemy Ethiopia that reach further
back than the period of Italian colonialism. In this respect, Denison may
be right to claim that ‘Asmara is adamant to break the traditional African
hostility to an acceptance of the continent’s colonial history’ (Denison
et al. 2003). But for the Eritrean government to embrace its Italian
colonial heritage does not equal willingness to globally ‘share’ its owner-
ship. Instead, the Eritrean government exploits globalization trends and
mechanisms to assert the newly won Eritrean national sovereignty by
exploiting a sense of colonial nostalgia.
Svetlana Boym (2001) ultimately distinguishes between restora-
tive nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. According to Boym, restorative
nostalgia manifests itself in the total reconstruction of monuments of the
past. For the restorative nostalgic, the past is a value for the present—
it is not a time period but a snapshot of an ‘original image’ (ibid.:
322 C. Rausch
49). As a consequence, restorative nostalgics do not think of them-

selves as nostalgic; instead, they believe that their project is about truth.
Clearly, such restorative nostalgia—instead of reflective nostalgia, which
I will define below—informs Eritrean governmental reasoning. After
all, the Eritrean government lists among the most important lessons
learned from CARP both ‘the empowerment to identify, know and
write Eritrean ancient history free from Axumite hegemony and exces-
sive Sabean [read: Ethiopian] influence’ and the ‘improved interpretation
of Eritrean history by Eritreans’ (DUD Ministry of Public Works 2006:
43).
The transnational occupation with Asmara’s modern architectural
heritage, however, is also fuelled by restorative nostalgia. One of my
diplomat interviewees in Asmara, for instance, admitted that she likes to
‘imagine sometimes how it must have been when the Italians were still
here,’ claiming that ‘a splash of paint would make a world of difference’
(Anonymous 2010e). Evidence of this type of nostalgia can be found in
the funding of the EU National Heritage Programme, which is limited
to the restoration of two iconic buildings. In one way or another, this
isolated restoration of two monuments will result in the creation of two
perfect snapshots of the past, feeding the different restorative nostalgias
behind the valorization of Asmara’s modern heritage.
Though transnational organizations ascribe much of the development
potential of Asmara’s modern heritage to tourism, the vision of a metic-
ulously restored, monumental Asmara—although obviously far from
attainable in the near future—does not seem to attract tourists from
abroad. The few foreigners who do make it to Asmara for reasons of
tourism often come because of the crumbling patina of its colonial built
environment. If they are not put off by the Eritrean government’s restric-
tive foreign visa regulations and global warnings about instability and
violent conflict in the Horn of Africa region, they visit Asmara because
of its exotic allure of secrecy.
When I waited at Asmara International Airport’s baggage claim on the
eve of the Eritrean Christmas holiday together with many people from
the Eritrean diaspora and just a handful of Asians and Europeans, I met
a Viennese historic preservationist and his wife who had come to spend
their vacation in Asmara. The two told me that they had first gotten to
know about the city through Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City. They
had even taken the book with them as a travel guide. Now that they
had arrived, they feared they would not be able to experience the city as
presented in the book, patina and all. Having read about the many inter-
national initiatives launched to restore Asmara, they were anxious that
much of the façades would be hidden behind scaffolding. Of course,
when I met them again a couple of days later, they readily admitted
that this worry had been ungrounded, given the virtual lack of any
building construction perhaps even inappropriate considering Asmara’s
visible poverty.
This story captures Boym’s notion of an alternative to restorative
nostalgia, as reflective nostalgics
… are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home
is in ruins or, on the contrary, has just been renovated and gentrified
beyond recognition. This defamiliarization drives [reflective nostalgics]
to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present, and
future. (Boym 2001: 50)
As far as our two tourists are ‘longing for a different place’ and ‘yearning
for a different time’ (ibid.: xv), they certainly display a nostalgia for
Asmara’s modern heritage. Their actual experience of Asmara resembles
the reflective nostalgia described by Boym; ‘it reveals longing and critical
thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not
absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection’ (ibid.: 50).
Though Boym acknowledges a need to accommodate a sense of longing
for the past, for her, ‘the past is not made in the image of the present
or seen as foreboding of some present disaster; rather the past opens
up a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of historic
development’ (ibid.: 50). As a consequence, ‘a modern nostalgic can be
homesick and sick of home at the same time,’ which may be how those
tourists felt once they had landed in Asmara (ibid.: 50).
324 C. Rausch
Preserving Cultural Heritage

for Development: The Need for Reflexivity
In this chapter, I have attempted to narrate relationships between
Asmara’s past and future. I have tried to illustrate the multitude of possi-
bilities opened up by the heritage valorization of Asmara’s modern archi-
tecture. My analysis of the global heritage assemblage around Asmara
points out the pitfalls of cultural heritage preservation for development
in Eritrea and can be read as a plea for a reflective nostalgia of the
modern. I contend that contemporary governmental rationalities, rather
than indulging in restorative nostalgia for the colonial politics of a recent
past, need to reflect on how the global fascination with Asmara’s modern
heritage problematizes Eritrea’s politics of sovereignty and security today.
As my example shows, the Eritrean government instrumentalizes the
colonial built environment of Asmara in order to establish its newly
won national sovereignty, all the while violating fundamental human
rights and obstructing transnational politics of security. The World Bank
and the European Union, however, cast these problems aside, as their
interventions in Eritrea depend on positive references to the potential of
Asmara’s modern heritage for global development.
In effect, this transnational nostalgia for Asmara’s modern architec-
ture obscures poverty, hunger, and militarism in the Horn of Africa. The
tentative UNESCO World Heritage List entry, for instance, considered
it ironic that post-colonial ‘turbulence’ and ‘continuous unrest’ should
have ‘served to protect Asmara’s unique urban heritage’ so that its build-
ings have ‘remained untouched’ (UNESCO 2005). Moreover, a foreword
to the book Asmara: The Frozen City somewhat cynically states that for a
‘mysterious, slightly crumbling, ideal city of modernism […] poverty is
the best way to protect monuments’ (Visscher and Boness 2006: 10). In
the end, Edward Denison maintains the success of his engagement with
CARP and the National Heritage Programme:
Although it may not be earth shattering in its wider significance, it tells

good news from Africa. That is a welcome rarity in itself and repre-
sents an attempt to seek alternative approaches to development that
have not been given much hearing. [A problem is that] the timeframe
required [for] measuring the success of cultural preservation, which often

far exceeds the limited schedules of today’s mega-donors. Cultural preser-
vation cannot be ascribed an annual figure to demonstrate improvement.
And it might sometimes only involve maintaining the status quo in the
face of widespread change. When successful, it underpins the broader
aims of development, linking the past with the present – and the present
with the future. (Denison 2009)
Denison may be right when he states that ‘slowly but surely Eritrea is
learning to exploit the Western fascination with Asmara to support other
development programs,’ but an important question to ask would be how
does it do so and to what ends?
I have analyzed how the Eritrean government bases its problematic
politics of national sovereignty on a kind of restorative nostalgia. Svetlana
Boym likens nostalgia in general to:
a transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning.

Yet this transformation can take different turns. It may increase the eman-
cipatory possibilities and individual choices […]. It can also be politically
manipulated through newly recreated practices of national commemora-
tion with the aim of re-establishing social cohesion, a sense of security
and an obedient relationship to authority. (Boym 2001: 42)
It is not that the Eritrean government’s domestic repression is completely

ignored, as many of my expatriate interviewees in Eritrea have doubts
about the ‘development impact’ of the preservation of the modern archi-
tectural heritage of Asmara and say they would have spent the money
in other ways. Paradoxically, however, the obvious contingency of poli-
tics of national sovereignty and transnational security does not seem to
reduce the colonial nostalgia for Asmara’s modern built environment.
Certainly, some reflect on what happens when a young African nation-
state is forced to operate in a global space of transnational governance.
Denison, for instance, claims:
Eritrea, to be fair to their government, they’ve always taken the line of

self-reliance. And they’ve also shot themselves in the foot probably more
times than not, but they at least are a developing country that has taken
326 C. Rausch
that line consistently, and if that means building a wall around their
border and saying we’re on our own, they’ll do it. And it might ruin
ties with the nations but they’ll do it, they’ve got that sort of headstrong
mentality. And that pisses the West off, because the West knows ulti-
mately, they’re right. You know why should a country exist on favours by
the West? (Denison 2009)
Such critical views of contemporary norms and forms of government

are hardly represented in official policy documents. In fact, as James
Ferguson has pointed out in a different yet applicable context: ‘there
are a host of statements, which are, if not actually forbidden, at any
rate profoundly unhelpful in the discourse of a development agency’
(Ferguson 1994: 68).
Policy Suggestions
If there are lessons from my analysis that could be turned into policy
advice, it is that there is an absolute need to
1. critically acknowledge those ‘unhelpful statements’;

2. make a reflexive effort of understanding exactly how, and why, they
appear ‘unhelpful’; and
3. probe relevant conflicts of interests, which could point to the many
possible pitfalls when preserving cultural heritage for development—
for instance those lying in contested politics of sovereignty and
security.
In any case, my argumentation in this chapter clearly suggests that

nostalgia, at least nostalgia of the restorative kind, is a particularly bad
policy advisor. And against this background, I would like to close with
one of my expatriate interviewees’ comments on the political situation in
Eritrea: ‘There is reason to believe that things can’t possibly stay as they
are.’
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Epilogue: Whose Heritage, Whose
Development?
Chris Boonzaaier
The main aim of this book was to determine in what ways heritage,
sustainability, and development intersect in Africa. This firstly implied
that the relationships, tensions, and challenges between heritage, devel-
opment, and sustainability in Africa had to be investigated. Secondly, it
required reflection on how heritage is conceptualized in diverse African
contexts and how it interfaces with social, economic, and political prior-
ities. For this epilogue, the chapters of the volume have been analyzed
in the context of these objectives. In what follows, an attempt will also
be made to reflect on what issues relating to heritage, development,
and sustainability are specifically relevant to Africa and whether they are
distinct to certain parts of Africa. Possible actions to be considered to
rectify tensions and to address challenges will be indicated.
Africa’s multifaceted heritage is both regarded as a resource to be
utilized and a potential constraint on rapid development. Different
C. Boonzaaier (B)
University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_12
332 C. Boonzaaier
values are attached to heritage by members of various elites and by ‘ordi-

nary people.’ The latter follow a pragmatic approach using their ‘heritage’
in an everyday way to make a living whereas the elites often exploit
heritage or its products to accrue prestige. Although these uses might
not be in direct opposition, they seem to rarely intersect with resultant
tensions and disagreements. In these asymmetrical contexts, the voices of
ordinary people are often marginalized. These realities present real chal-
lenges to post-colonial heritage practices which are supposed to promote
democracy, human rights, equal access to resources, and contribute to the
ideals of the development of the African continent as stated in the UN
Sustainable Development Goals and the AU Agenda 2063 (Ndoro and
Pwiti 2001). Hence, it is important to pay due attention to how issues
of heritage, tradition, and culture are socially stratified and structured,
both locally and in wider global terms.
In sub-Saharan Africa, decisions relating to heritage, development,
and sustainability tend to be channeled primarily through community
leaders (the so-called local elite). In this way, heritage conservation and
economic development become, in the words of Robinson (1999: 17),
‘highly symbolic’ of the power of the local elite, leaving ordinary people
outside the sphere of decision making and power. As I have written else-
where, the result is predictable, as ‘(i)n the process, community leaders
(local elite) draw on their natural resources as well as their cultural
resources, and in doing so, may even accept the risk of destroying these
resources’ (2007: 94). A case study from the Limpopo Province of South
Africa (Boonzaaier 2007) illustrates this point.
The community leaders (the local elite) wanted to convert a natural
heritage site into a game reserve for trophy hunting at the expense
of cattle owners who grazed their cattle in the area and women from
a nearby village, who extracted salt from the soil surrounding a hot
spring regarded as a sacred place. The women benefited economically
from the spring by extracting salt from it using traditional processes that
involved religious practices and traditional extracting skills. The different
interests of the community leaders, on the one hand, and the cattle
owners and women, on the other hand, resulted in considerable tension
and conflict in the area (cf. Kolkman 2002: 37–38). This case study
further shows that power concentrated in a dominant and outspoken
leader (a representative of the local elite) can easily be the most decisive
impediment for cultural or natural heritage and development projects.
‘From the perspective of such a leader, consensus decision making is
unnecessary, which implies that community members are deliberately
kept in sub-ordinate positions’ (Boonzaaier 2007: 96; cf. Timothy 2002:
159). This case study also shows that the participation of a wider range
of community members is often constrained by social structures and
responsibilities within a community. For example, in some communi-
ties, women may not make or implement any decisions related to work
without the approval of their husbands or male counterparts. In this
context, tribal authorities often take control over development and/or
conservation projects without necessarily having the local expertise or
the interests of ‘their’ community in mind (Boonzaaier 2007: 96–97;
cf. Wassermann and Kriel 1997: 77). This elite monopolization and
exploitation of heritage not only reifies the differences between the elite
and the rest of the community but can also exasperate them—a serious
consideration on a continent which boasts some of the highest Gini
coefficients in the world.
The relationship between heritage protection and economic develop-
ment continues to be a cause of tension in Africa and elsewhere. As it
stands, the heritage sector on the continent is generally weak, its gover-
nance and its voice are rarely present when development agendas are
discussed. This situation is worsened due to heritage practitioners’ reluc-
tance to engage with decision makers at economic or political levels (cf.
Fleming 2014; Wait and Altschul 2014). On the one hand, archaeol-
ogists as heritage practitioners argue that as a neutral party they have
little power or influence (Ndoro and Pwiti 2001: 23), and, on the
other hand, archaeology and heritage are not sufficiently recognized by
economists and development practitioners as assets that can contribute to
social and economic development (Gould and Burtenshaw 2014). As a
result, cultural heritage continues to receive little attention (Burtenshaw
2014: 48). However, Gould and Burtenshaw (2014: 8) state quite frankly
that since archaeology is hard-pressed for support, ‘it is incumbent on
archaeologists to make the effort to correct the lapse.’ One could extend
their argument to the heritage community as a whole. The heritage
334 C. Boonzaaier
community needs to recognize that neutrality is neither helpful nor suffi-

cient when development projects impact indigenous communities, their
cultures, traditional knowledge, and heritage resources in ways that are
seriously detrimental to their ways of life and when this impact is dispro-
portionate to the effect on other groups. Unattended, such trends will
sustain or even widen social rifts and divisions. Such projects, therefore,
bring into relief questions about archaeologists’ professional neutrality.
Through their ‘neutrality,’ they may, for instance, become associated with
a contested development project that involves human rights violations
as highlighted by Taha in this volume. These scenarios emphasize the
importance of consulting and engaging with stakeholder communities as
this is the only means of reconciling divergent needs and expectations (cf.
Nthiga et al. 2011: 107–125; Abungu 2016: 91–111). For the sake of
perspective, it should be acknowledged that the conservation of tradition
is not always in the hands of either heritage managers or the customary
bearers of heritage as macroeconomic, political, and social factors far
beyond their control can challenge and undermine their efforts.
The importance of international organizations such as UNESCO,
IUCN, ICCROM, and ICOMOS in protecting fragile and irreplace-
able World Heritage Sites should be emphasized here. They may have
the power to affect attitudes and decision making at high levels of
government, provided that they take on more active roles in control-
ling development projects that impact communities negatively. Heritage
management which involves the community can create employment, an
increase in heritage tourism, educational opportunities, and an appreci-
ation and development of the cultural landscape. However, the involve-
ment of communities is limited largely due to a lack of capacity which
does not allow for indigenous research or even broader site investiga-
tion. Furthermore, African inscriptions on the World Heritage List are
scarce and hardly representative. Yet, the impression is evoked that the
inscription of heritage sites has been prioritized while neglecting one of
the most important prerequisites for sustainable heritage conservation,
namely empowerment. Capacity building should be accepted as prereq-
uisite for community involvement. The impact of the tourism industry
and associated commodification of cultural heritage is another matter
of great concern that requires attention (Breen 2007: 366–367; Arazi
2009). Relevant international organizations have an ethical imperative

to address these matters. Current national legal frameworks also require
urgent revision. Ndoro and Pwiti remark that ‘current heritage manage-
ment in southern Africa is conducted under the patchwork of legal and
regulatory mandates promulgated by governments linked to a middle
class with strong links to Western cultural milieus. These mandates are
never designed in consultation with the local communities’ (2001: 33).
Given this background, it is not surprising that one of the issues that
run through most of the chapters is the alienation experienced by many
local communities from their cultural heritage. Outdated approaches to
heritage management continue to be applied, and this undermines the
possibility of compatibility between development for the people and
conservation of their heritage resources. In certain African countries,
such as Zimbabwe, legislative and administrative structures established
during the colonial period still prevail and remain inadequate in terms
of evoking wider public interest. Furthermore, in all Southern African
countries, except South Africa, legislation has had the side effect of
turning archaeological sites into government property. Furthermore,
protective legislation (e.g., the Zimbabwean National Museums and
Monuments Act) requires the public to notify the authority of any
archaeological sites or relics that they find and also makes it an offense to
destroy, alter, damage, or remove any archaeological data without written
approval from the authority. This implies that the onus is ultimately on
the ‘public’ to identify and assist the government with the conservation
of archaeological resources—a prospect which is particularly problem-
atic when government involvement has continued to be associated with
Western ideas and international demands rather than local values, rituals,
and cultural practices. A quirk of fate is that at grassroots level, commu-
nity members are not necessarily aware of this legislation (Ndoro and
Pwiti 2001: 24–25).
The most obvious solution appears to be to move away from an elitist
to a more people-centered approach. Several leading authors on African
heritage, such as Pikirayi (2011), Abungu (2016), and Schmidt (2016),
are in support of partnerships or collaborative heritage conservation
programs in which communities are the most important stakeholders.
336 C. Boonzaaier
This would imply that the continued use of oral traditions and tradi-
tional knowledge systems is indispensable for sustainable heritage conser-
vation in the African context. Therefore, the development of policy that
acknowledges cultural values and practices and ensures the employment
of empowered people in professional heritage management structures is
recommended. As such, this volume considers empowerment as a devel-
opment instrument in the context of heritage management. Communi-
ties should be empowered to engage with their pasts in ways that are
beneficial to their lives in the present. That includes representation in
the management of heritage sites as well as in any related research (field-
work) because local communities compose an important knowledge base.
Ultimately, it is about sharing the past and allowing alternative interpre-
tations thereof. How such knowledge and interpretations are processed
by professionals in consultation with local communities will eventually
determine how heritage management will be approached in Africa. It is
reasonable to expect that such an involvement of communities should
lead to the restoration of pride in their local heritage and a realization
of the need for its continued conservation (Ndoro and Pwiti 2001: 32;
Pikirayi 2016: 133).
Empowerment is in practice, however, often found to be of a highly
superficial and localized nature. Typically, because of the absence of
institutional means of establishing authority, empowered people remain
localized and discontent as they continue to feel neglected and deprived
of the benefits emanating from the sites which they feel entitled to.
Again, a more people-oriented approach according to which local popu-
lations should be involved in heritage management, integrating both
traditional and scientific procedures, is suggested to be vital to ensuring
the future continuity of strong links between local people and their
heritage. A deliberate attempt in this regard has been made by Boonzaaier
(2012) who adopted the Community-based Natural Resource Manage-
ment (CBNRM) approach according to which traditional authority
structures are used as a basis for the management of natural resources
and, if necessary, can be adapted to conserve and develop cultural
heritage resources as well. Such an approach includes the possible democ-
ratization of management practices to ensure that they represent the
people’s needs and wishes (cf. Chipfuva and Saarinen 2011; Mbaiwa
2005). Democracy is used here to reflect how it works in traditional sub-

Saharan African contexts where it is based on consensus and as such may
be referred to as ‘consensual democracy’ (Senghor 1964; Nyerere 1971;
Wiredu 1997; Wamala 2004). This concept is defined by Wiredu (2002:
par 16) as follows: ‘It was a democracy because government was by the
consent, and subject to the control of the people as expressed through
their representatives. It was consensual because, at least as a rule, that
consent was negotiated on the principle of consensus’ (Wiredu 2002: par
16; Ani 2014; Matolino 2013). Although this concept has been criticized
by scholars such as Eze (1997) and Ajei (2015), the principle of delibera-
tion implied in this concept is not without merits in respect of CBNRM.
At community level, members are not only represented in council but
are also present in counsel for discussions of any matter relevant to their
interests. Hence, for the sake of perspective it has to be realized that
consensus is not a particularly political phenomenon but an inherent
approach to social relations (Wiredu 2002: par 2, 14). As a fundamental
human right, the principle of representation (deliberation) should not
only be practiced at community level but also extended to negotiations
with authoritative structures at higher levels of governance.
In Western culture, a divide is made between nature and culture.
In sub-Saharan Africa, this divide is not necessary absolute. Many
communities in Western, Eastern, and Southern Africa attach (intan-
gible) cultural meanings to natural phenomena that result in an inter-
twined, almost inseparable relationship with nature in their cultural
practices, values, and belief systems (Mkenda 2010; Bernard 2003, 2007;
Meskell 2012; De Beer 1995, 1996, 1999). Yet in practice, the devel-
opment of conservation initiatives that encompass cultural heritage is
often neglected, as priority is given to nature conservation. Wildlife
and wildlife geographical areas are regarded as economically viable in
Africa while cultural heritage resources have often proven to be less
sustainable or lucrative (Keitumetse 2009). When environmental policy
is formulated, cultural heritage resources have until recently received
very little, if any, attention (Pathak et al. 2005; De Beer 1999; Boon-
zaaier 2010). Unless the impacts of economic growth and development
on both cultural and natural heritage are taken into consideration early
in the planning stages, the continent may lose some of its priceless
338 C. Boonzaaier
treasures. Conservation of natural heritage should not exclude cultural

heritage since this affects any efforts of both natural and cultural heritage
conservation negatively. Part of the solution probably lies in a change
of perceptions and an acceptance by the global heritage community
of the many different understandings of heritage as it is conceived by
local communities. In many parts of the world, this will entail an
interpretation of nature which draws upon and respects living cultural
traditions, has sustainability as a central goal, and includes varied heritage
stakeholders (Eckert et al. 2001; Boonzaaier 2007; Roe et al. 2001).
Hence, local communities will not necessarily agree to utilize their
heritage for the same reasons or with the same aims that heritage profes-
sionals argue for elsewhere in the world (Ndoro and Pwiti 2001; cf. West
and Ndlovu 2010). In this regard, this volume also helps to show how the
dominant Eurocentric approaches to conserving the past (which center
on the preservation of tangible cultural heritage) are inadequate for most
African countries. The interpretation of any heritage, particularly in the
African context, must be done by taking the intangible, symbolic domain
as point of departure. What persists throughout many parts of Africa is
often the intangible that resides in the memories of the people and is
conveyed from one generation to another through performative partic-
ipation and abstraction in works of art. For the sake of perspective, it
is important to mention that in the African context ‘(a)rtistic creations
are rarely separate from practical, social or religious motivations’ (Ndoro
and Pwiti 2001: 25). Hence, the intangible is not necessarily sepa-
rated from the tangible. In fact, cultural values are not only attached
to cultural objects but also to particular places which are central to
understanding the social and religious worlds of particular communi-
ties. Hence, advancing the understanding of the significance attached to
‘places of the past’ by contemporary peoples remains an essential field of
commitment for archaeologists and heritage practitioners, and I suggest
this is particularly so in the context of African heritage (see also Bowser
and Zedeño 2009; Bernard 2007; Scheub 2010; Boonzaaier and Wels
2016; cf. Harrison and Rose 2010).
The importance of balancing tangible heritage with intangible heritage
implies the recognition of traditional knowledge in the conservation of
heritage. A plea is also made for the development of indigenous archae-

ology by following a collaborative approach that blends the strength of
Western archaeological science with the knowledge and epistemologies
of indigenous peoples—a celebration of alternative strategies. The chal-
lenge for heritage managers is to understand, recognize, and support the
intangible meanings that communities attach to things (Ndoro and Pwiti
2001).
This volume bears evidence that tensions exist between the agendas
of heritage management, development, and sustainability. This is not
peculiar to Africa, as it is a global phenomenon. Unique to Africa, and
to other so-called Third World countries on other continents, are the
causes of these tensions and the resulting challenges. In Africa, apart
from the most obvious causes of tensions such as poverty, armed conflict,
and political instability, is the fact that culture is often not perceived
or protected in its totality by heritage practitioners. Cultural properties
recognized on the World Heritage List, in particular, do not consider
the intangible aspects of each site but are categorized according to
criteria that have been formulated by the World Heritage Convention
(1972). The immense richness of Africa’s heritage cannot be reduced
to these categories (Ndoro and Pwiti 2001: 25). Unless local commu-
nities are regarded as full-fledged stakeholders in development projects,
these tensions will never be addressed. If the current status quo prevails,
the development agenda will have a considerable negative impact on
the continent’s heritage. Until these issues are properly addressed, not
only will the question ‘Whose heritage and whose development?’ remain,
but existing community relationships to their heritage will also become
increasingly fraught and at times undermined. Unless these challenges
are met in constructive forward-looking manners, the continent will be
deprived of important parts of its heritage and local communities will be
the main losers.
340 C. Boonzaaier
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Index
Note: Page numbers in italic indicates figures.
A African Union
AAA. See Australian Archaeological Agenda 2063 70, 104–107,
Association (AAA) 112–115, 119, 120, 332
abductees, Uganda 266, 282 Strategic Urban Development
Abungu, P.O. 335 Plan, Asmara 320
academic disciplines African World Heritage Fund 7
differing perceptions of ‘heritage’ Agbamevoza festival, Agotime,
in 65–66 Ghana 181–194, 186
’indigenous archaeology’ 73–76 agriculture, foreign investment in
need for transformation of 202, 79, 84
206, 207, 220 AHD. See Authorised Heritage
role in policy formulation 50, 337 Discourse (AHD)
accountability post-conflict. See aid, foreign 18
transitional justice (TJ) and decentralization, West Africa
accreditation. See credentialing of 257
heritage trainees in Eritrea 298, 300, 317–323
aesthetic justice 271, 288–289 Travelling Testimonies exhibition,
African National Congress (ANC) Uganda 265–278
174–175 Ajei, M.O. 337
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 345
license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1
346 Index
al-Bashir, Omar 132 Asmara, Eritrea 297–306

Algeria 114 Association of Southern African
Alizim, Badoualou Karka 248 Professional Archaeologists
Allen, Tim 270 (ASAPA) 203, 207, 220, 223
Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), Aswan Dam, Egypt 110, 111, 136
Uganda/DRC 273, 277, Atalay, Sonya 73
281–283, 286, 288 Australia 106, 113
Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali. See Australian Archaeological Association
KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and (AAA) 145
Research Institute (Amafa) authenticity 59, 110, 170
American Packard Humanities Authorised Heritage Discourse
Institute 136 (AHD) 13, 17, 22, 63
Amin, Idi 270, 273, 281 autochthonous peoples. 75. See also
ANC. See African National Congress indigenous peoples
(ANC) Azerbaijan 303
Angola 114
apartheid legacies 161, 163, 167,
168, 177
Apoh, Wazi 66 B
Apter, Andrew 190 Bajec, M. 288
Arabian Oryx Sanctuary, Oman 117 Bandiagara World Heritage Site,
archaeological impact assessments Mali 250
66–67, 82–83, 118–119 banks. See culture bank model, West
archaeology Africa; World Bank
different values placed on 59, ‘Bantustan’, South Africa 205, 224
109–110, 117 Basotho heritage professionals 213,
’indigenous archaeology’ 73–76 215, 218, 219
transformation of in southern Basu, P. 27
Africa 202–204 Batoro-Bakonzo conflict, Uganda
see also academic disciplines; 281
heritage professionals Bazira, Amon, ‘20 Years of Bitterness’
architecture, modern, as heritage 281
297–299 Bench Marks Foundation 165
archives, Uganda’s official 266–268 Benhamou, Françoise 240
art Benin 236–237, 240–241, 245–247
and intangible heritage 335–339 Bernal, Martin, Black Athena 68
and memorialization 266, 270 Bharucha, Rustom 287
Arthur, Charles 31, 204–223 ‘biocultural’ heritage 89
Arua, Uganda 273, 275 Blackmore, Kara 25, 28, 32, 265
Index 347
bodies suffering, avoiding images of CBNRM. See Community-based

288 Natural Resource Management
Bonaparte, Napoleon 10 (CBNRM)
Boonzaaier, Chris 31, 34, 331–339 CDIS. See Culture for Development
Botswana 21, 29, 51, 52–54, 69, 70, Indicators (CDIS) project
114 censorship 313–315
Bourdieu, P. 253 central Africa
Boym, Svetlana 319, 321, 325 population growth rates 80–81
Branch, Adam 271 Twa communities 75. See also
Brazil 107, 129 individual countries
Breen, Colin 70 Central African Republic (CAR) 270
British colonial legacy Césaire, Aimé 68
Eritrea 297 Challis, Sam 31, 201–223
Ghana 182 chieftaincy as colonial legacy
Kenya 68 189–190
British Museum 136 China
Brundtland, G.H. 170 investment in Africa 84, 110,
Brundtland Report 19, 239 111, 113
Bui Dam, Ghana 66, 67 Three Gorges Dam 107, 112
Burkina Faso 22 Chirikure, Shadreck 85, 119
Burtenshaw, P. 333 Christianity 26, 103, 290
Buthelezi, Prince Inkosi Clifford Collard, Niamh Jane 30,
uMangosuthu 172–174 181–197
Bwambale, Father Landas 282 climate change 6, 117
Bwambale, Jackson 286 Coal of Africa Ltd 66, 118
Bwambale, Wilson 282 colonialism, legacies of
in African archaeology 203
Asmara, Eritrea 298–300, 302,
304, 307–309, 311–323
C Dutch settlers, South Africa 159
Cameroon 85, 116 Ghana 181–189
camps for Internally Displaced and ‘Indigenous’ designations 74
Persons 266, 288 Nigeria 184–187
Canada 106 Uganda 266, 268
capacity building 31, 201–217 colonialism, modern comparisons
CAR. See Central African Republic 298
(CAR) commercialization
CARP. See Cultural Assets of agriculture 78, 135
Rehabilitation Project (CARP) of heritage 171, 178
348 Index
of water management 78. See also Protection and Promotion of

dam projects the Diversity of Cultural
Common Market for Eastern and Expressions (2005) 17, 144
Southern Africa (COMESA) Safeguarding of the Intangible
105, 113 Cultural Heritage (2003) 21,
Community-based Natural Resource 58, 144
Management (CBNRM) 336 World Heritage (1972) 57, 339
community, definitions of 24, Côte d’Ivoire 105, 116
74, 149, 158. See also local Council for the Development of
communities Social Science Research in
compensation Africa 15
in culture bank model 235–237 courts, role in peacebuilding 265,
for displaced people 133, 140, 269
276 Cox, Robert 237
‘complex multilateralism’ 237 craftwork as heritage 181, 182, 185,
conflicts 51, 116, 130, 132, 194, 196
171, 223, 266, 270, 272, credentialing of heritage trainees
287. See also post-conflict 206, 220
reconstruction projects crisis narratives, use of 6
consensus, local 333 Crosby, Todd 236, 240, 253
conservation Crowfoot, J.W. 137
apartheid legacy in 161, 163, Cultural Assets Rehabilitation Project
168, 177 (CARP) 302–311, 314–318,
‘fortress’ approach challenged 22, 320, 322, 324
26, 171 culture
importance of engaging with local as key to sustainable development
community for 110, 145, 173 16, 21, 108, 301
and Indigenous Peoples 73–76 legitimation of through
nature-culture dichotomy in 34, archaeology 207
48, 50, 57, 108 versus nature conservation 28, 80
‘preventive’ 237 culture bank model, West Africa 32,
versus development 104, 108, 238, 235–241, 245–247, 253,
109 255, 258
Convention, Ramsar, on Wetlands Culture for Development Indicators
(1971) 58 (CDIS) project 21–22
Conventions, UNESCO 20
Biological Diversity (1992) 58
D
Dafalla, H. 131, 137
Index 349
Dam Implementation Unit (DIU), Asmara: The Secret Modernist City

Sudan 132–136 304–307, 313, 318
dam projects 110, 129 Deubel, T. 236, 240
Aswan Dam, Egypt 111, 136 ‘development discourse’ 16, 23, 32,
China 107, 112, 128–129 206, 237, 289
Farakka Dam, India 113 Dewees, Peter 303
Gibe III Dam project, Ethiopia De Wet, C.J. 128
111–112 ‘dialogical truths’ 275
Grand Inga Dam, DRC 106–107 dictatorships 129, 132, 298, 310,
Lesotho 204 311
Merowe Dam, Sudan 130–143 Dimbal, Mali 250
Stiegler Gorge, Tanzania 111 Diop, Cheikh Anta 10, 68
‘dark heritage’ 267 Disappearances of People in Uganda
De Beers Group 118 inquiry (1974) 270
decentralization, West Africa 257 disciplines, academic. See academic
decision-making processes, disciplines
participants in displacement of people 11, 26
heritage professionals 304 apartheid legacy of 159, 161–163,
local communities 144, 146, 147, 167, 168, 177
158, 339 for conservation projects 17, 30,
Declaration of Independence, 309, 333
Rwenzururu, Uganda 280 for Gulf State agricultural
decolonization 4, 68. See also investments 135
colonialism, legacies of; Internally Displaced Persons
post-colonial heritage practices camps 266
De Jong and Rowlands (eds.), for MDPs 127–130, 140, 146,
Reclaiming Heritage 290 148
Democratic Governance Facility, and property evaluations 59
Uganda 273, 290 through conflicts 51
Democratic Republic of Congo Uganda 266
(DRC) 270, 277, 291 DIU. See Dam Implementation Unit
Allied Democratic 281 (DIU), Sudan
Allied Democratic Forces 273, diversity, cultural, in Africa 3–5, 34,
277, 286 113, 191, 257
Grand Inga Dam 106–107 Djibouti 320
mining industry 114 domestication of food sources 77, 79
Denison, Edward 304, 305, 307, donors. See sponsorship,
311, 313, 318–321, 324–326 international
350 Index
drama, in Travelling Testimonies equality issues within heritage

exhibition 277–278 management 24, 183, 190
DRC. See Democratic Republic of Equatorial Guinea 114
Congo (DRC) Eritrea 33, 297, 298, 300, 302–305,
Du Bois, William 68 307–318, 320, 321, 324, 325
Duma clan 171 Eritrean Conservation Fund (ECF)
308
Eritrean War of Independence 300
Ethiopia
E economic transformation plans
Earth Summit (1992) 20 105
East African Community (EAC) 113 and Eritrea 298, 300, 303, 307
Ebola crisis 195 Gibe III Dam project 111–112
ecology and agricultural histories 65, ethnoarchaeology 73
81 EU development program, Horn of
economic growth 8, 111, 119, 241. Africa 298, 316, 321, 322, 324
See also mega development Eurocentric approaches to heritage
projects (MDPs) 30, 170, 338
economic needs of craftworkers 165, Europe. See colonialism, legacies of
181–183, 185, 188, 194 Ewe language, Ghana 185
economic transformation plans 105 exhibitions, Uganda 265–291
ecosystems, historical development expert-trainee divides 214
of 21, 81 Eze, E.C. 337
education. See credentialing of Ezeigbo, Akachi 285
heritage trainees; culture bank Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife,
model, West Africa South Africa 162
Egypt 10, 105, 111, 134, 135
electricity supply problems 105–106
elephant hunting 81, 115 F
elites, local 11, 84, 184 Fair Trade 212
eMakhosini Valley, South Africa fascism 300
159–163 Ferguson, James 206, 315, 326
empowerment and heritage develop- festivals and heritage, Ghana
ment 202, 203, 207, 211, 220, 181–189
237, 322, 334, 336 field technicians, credentialing of
energy projects 105–108. See also 212, 220, 221
dam projects ‘Fight Against Poverty’ (World Bank)
‘environment’, in southern Africa 47, 236, 255, 259
48, 53 financial crisis 2008 19, 84
Index 351
‘first-comers’ and ‘late-comers’ 76 Georgia 303

Fleming, Arlene 301, 303, 305, 309 Germany 117
flooding 138 Geschiere, P. 75, 85, 86
Fombori, Mali 235, 236, 240 gffa, Eritrea 313
food crops, globalized history of 77 Ghana 22, 66, 114, 181–185,
food security 78, 128, 135, 298, 316 188–192, 195, 198
foreign investment 114, 119 glades, history of 81–82
heritage rescue projects 111, 144 global heritage assemblage 301, 306,
‘land grabbing’ 84, 135 315, 324
in Lesotho’s heritage management globalization, impacts on heritage
209 1–5
mining projects 66 global warming. See climate change
tourism industry 5, 334 Gold Coast. See Ghana
see also aid, foreign; dam projects; Gould, P.G. 333
international sponsorship; graffiti 215, 216
World Bank Grameen Bank 253
‘fortress conservation’ 29, 158, 174 Grand Inga Dam, DRC 106–107
Foucault, Michel 299 Graziano da Silva, José 19
French colonial legacy 75 Great Depression 106
French Ministry of Foreign Affairs green energy 106
236, 244, 252 ‘grounded theory’ 241
fuel export earnings 196 Guang Yu Ren 304, 313, 320
Fuller, Mia 299 Asmara: The Secret Modernist City
future versus present aspects of 304–307, 313, 318
‘heritage’ 66, 88, 170, 239, ‘guarantee’ concept in cultural bank
270, 323, 325 model 250–252
Guichen, Gael de 255
Guinea 116, 195
G Gulf States 84, 134, 135
gacaca (traditional justice
mechanism) 270
Gavua, Kodzo 66
Gdansk Archaeological Museum 142
Gebremedhin, Naigzy 303, 304, H
311, 321 Habermas, Jürgen 267
Asmara: The Secret Modernist City Haile, Samson 311–314
304–307, 313, 318 Hakim, Roxanne 305, 306, 309, 310
Gellert, P.K. 127, 128 Hangzhou Conference, UNESCO
gentrification 65 257
352 Index
heritage, different understandings of Idelman, Eric 257

4, 7, 11, 12, 30, 63, 141, 145, IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons).
290, 312, 338 See displacement of people
‘heritageization’ 31, 250, 258, 272 Ilojo Bar, Lagos 67
‘heritage natures’ 80–82 Images of War and Peacemaking
heritage professionals 15, 23 exhibition (2013) 272, 275
need for transformation of impact assessments 19, 66, 82, 83,
approach 222 107, 112, 118, 120, 176
‘neutrality’ of 147, 206, 334 independence era 19
role in decision making 107, 120 India 84, 86, 113
heritage rescue projects 111, 144, ‘indigenous archaeology’ 73–76, 339
147, 148 indigenous peoples
Heritage Unit, South Africa 175 clashes with archaeologists
Hirsch, P. 112 141–143
history-writing ‘from below’ 207 connections with natural
hotspots, biodiversity 81–82 environment 52
Hughes, Rachel 288 definitions of 74, 148
human body suffering, avoiding residing in protected sites 86
images of 288 through ‘indigenous knowledge’
human development 8, 237, 256 65, 68, 74
Human Development Index (HDI) Indonesia 111
239 inequality gap widens 9
humanitarian disasters 138 infrastructure expansions 83, 84,
human rights, Eritrea 314 120. See also dam projects
Human Security agenda 257–258 initiation rituals 184
Huyssen, Andreas 268 Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) 168,
hybrid heritages 85–88 172–176
hydropower. See dam projects intangible cultural heritage 21, 58,
65, 84, 250
culture bank model 235, 241
I Lesotho 202, 213
ICCROM. See International Centre South Africa 171
for the Study of the Preser- see also living heritages
vation and Restoration of Intergovernmental Conference on
Cultural Property (ICCROM) Cultural Policies in Africa
ICOMOS. See International Council (AFRICACULT) 16
on Monuments and Sites Internally Displaced Persons camps
(ICOMOS) 266, 288
iconoclasm 88
Index 353
International Centre for the Study of Johannesburg Summit (2002) 20

the Preservation and Restora- Juba Peace Agreement, Uganda
tion of Cultural Property 272–273
(ICCROM) 111, 237, 240, justice and memorialization, Uganda
255–256, 258, 334 265–269
International Council on Monu-
ments and Sites (ICOMOS)
59, 111, 250, 256, 304, 334 K
International Criminal Court (ICC) Kasese National Women’s Exchange
269–270 288
International Rivers (NGO) 131, Kasese, Uganda 268, 273, 275,
149 277–279, 281, 283, 285, 286,
international sponsorship 289, 290
culture bank model, West Africa Katse Dam, Lesotho 209
235–241, 253, 255, 258 Keita, Daouda 236, 240
Travelling Testimonies exhibition, Keitumetse, Susan O. 20, 21, 23,
Uganda 266, 268, 273, 277 25, 29, 47–60
see also aid, foreign; foreign kente cloth, Ghana 31, 181–185,
investment 186
International Union for Conserva- Kenya 52, 105, 112, 291
tion of Nature (IUCN) 49, Khama, Sir Seretse 68, 70
111, 334 Kilimanjaro, Kenya 52
invented traditions 30, 189, 190, King, Rachel 14, 19, 31, 201–223
249 Kitgum, Uganda 272, 273, 275
Iran 135 Kleinitz, C. 84
irrigation systems, history of 78. See Kothari, A. 337
also dam projects Koutammakou, Togo 236, 241, 244,
Isaias Afwerki 312 245, 246, 248
Isaya, King of Rwenzururu 280 Koywelo, Thomas 270
Islam 26, 103, 137, 277 Kpetoe, Ghana 181–184
Israel 135 KwaZulu Monuments Council 172,
Italian colonial legacies 298–301, 173
321 KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and Research
Ivoryton, US 86 Institute (Amafa) 159, 175
ivory trade 86
L
J Lake Nasser, Egypt 135
Japan 106 Lake Turkana, Kenya 112
354 Index
‘land grabbing’ 84, 135 livestock, cultural value of 165

land mines 277, 282, 286 living heritages 27, 30, 146, 178,
land reclamation issues 51 217, 219, 222
Lane, Paul 28, 63–89 craftwork as 27, 31, 181, 182,
language use in heritage management 187
11, 157 culture bank model 236
leaders, local. See elites, local; eMakhosini project, South Africa
Traditional Leaders, South 174, 176
Africa and ‘fortress conservation’ 29,
Learning and Innovation Loans 158, 174
(LILs) 301, 303 initiation rituals 219
legislation on heritage see also intangible cultural heritage
KwaZulu-Natal Amafa and local communities
Research Institute Act (2018) access to protected sites 54
175 challenges of engaging with 27,
KwaZulu-Natal Heritage Act 127, 144, 339
(2008) 175 clashes with archaeologists 6, 145,
National Heritage Resources Act 147
(2011), Lesotho 209 and consensus 337
need for transformation of 17, and culture banks 241, 248, 255,
31, 206, 217, 220, 222, 280 259
Sudanese Antiquities law 141, and ‘development discourse’ 206
144 excluded from decision-making
Zimbabwean National Museums 213
and Monuments Act 335 and human security agenda 257
see also Conventions, UNESCO and MDPs 127, 128, 146
Leloup, Mathilde 15, 18, 235–259 urban and rural community
Lesotho 68, 85, 202, 204, 206, 208, relations 84
209, 212, 217 see also displacement of people;
Lesotho Heritage Network (LHN) indigenous peoples; intangible
212 cultural heritage; poverty
Lesotho Highlands Water Project local elites 11, 84, 184, 188, 332,
(LHWP) 209 333
liberal peacebuilding paradigm looting 85, 115
268–271, 290 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA),
Libya 114 Uganda 266, 270, 272
Limpopo Province, South Africa 332 Louis, Marieke 237
livelihoods as heritage 31, 181–183, Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia
204, 218 111–112
Index 355
LRA vs. GoU conflict, Uganda Aswan Dam, Egypt 110, 111,
(1986–2007) 272, 273 136
Lugard, General 190 Bui Dam, Ghana 66
Luwero Triangle/Luwero Bush War, displacement of people for 128
Uganda (1981–1986) 273 foreign investment in 114
Luwero, Uganda 273, 275 Grand Inga Dam, DRC 106–107
Lynch, B.D. 128 North-South Corridor 113
Lynn, V. 288 Sudan’s dams 130
Three Gorges Dam, China
107, 112. See also foreign
M investment
MacDonald, Anna 270 Mehloding Community Trust 212
Makerere University, Uganda 271 memorialization 291
Mali 21, 32, 236, 240, 250 memorials 33
Manasir people 131, 142–143 Spirit of eMakhosini 162
mapping cultural heritage 53–56 to Voortrekkers, South Africa 160
maps mentoring trainee heritage managers
eMakhosini Valley, South Africa 206, 211, 213
159 Merowe Dam, Sudan 130–143
MCRM and MARA work, South Metolong Cultural Resource
Africa 205 Management (MCRM) Project
proposed dams, Sudan 143 204, 205, 209–213, 215, 217,
Travelling Testimonies exhibition 220, 223
Uganda 274 Metolong Dam, Lesotho 204
Mapungubwe, South Africa 66, 116 micro-credit. See culture bank model,
Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape West Africa
117–119 Middle East 19, 88, 135
Marie, Jerome 257 migration
Matatiele Archaeology and Rock from Eritrea 316
Art (MARA) Programme 204, and heritage 76
211–214, 217, 218, 220, 223 Millennium Development Goals
mato oput (traditional justice (MDGs) 237
mechanism) 271 mining industry, Africa 113
Mauss, Marcel 253 Mire, S. 17
Mazrui, Ali 103 Mkhize, Dr Zweli 161, 168, 176
Mchunu, Senzo 175, 176 modern architecture as colonial
Mchunu, Willies 176 heritage 298–301, 304, 306,
Mega Development Projects (MDPs) 315, 324
127, 128
356 Index
modernity and tradition 14, 16, 85, National Corporation for Antiquities
89, 115, 183, 187 and Museums (NCAM),
Modest, W. 27 Sudan 136, 141, 142
Mohale Dam, Lesotho 209 National Heritage Resources Act
Monga, Célestin 16 (2011), Lesotho 209
monuments councils, South Africa nationalism, heritage used to
172–174 promote 191, 311
Mountains of the Moon University, nationalization, Eritrea 309
Uganda 279 National Memory and Peace Docu-
Mozambique 21, 51, 114 mentation Centre (NMPDC)
Muhindo, Godwin 286 272, 289
multilateralism, ‘new’ and ‘complex’ National Resistance Movement party,
237 Uganda 273
multi-sited approaches 85 National Service, Eritrea 313
Mumbere, Charles, King of natural environment, local people’s
Rwenzururu 278 connections with 145, 336
Museum of London Archaeology natural World Heritage Sites 107,
Service (MoLAS) 211 116
museums 80 nature-culture conservation
in culture bank model 235, 236, dichotomy 57
240, 241, 246, 247 ‘natures, heritage’ 80–82
at Merowe Dam, Sudan 136 Ndebele, Sibusiso 162, 174
portrayal of Indigenous Peoples in Ndlovu, Ndukuyakhe 13, 14, 21,
80 157–177, 210
in post-conflict exhibition process Ndoro, Webber 29, 103–120, 170,
267 332, 335
Mussolini, Benito 300 necklacing 167
négritude 68
Nene Keteku III 186–187
‘neutrality’ of heritage professionals
147, 334
N New Partnership for African
Naidoo, R. 18 Development (NEPAD) 70,
Namibia 21, 22, 52, 114 107
Näser, C. 145 Ngorongoro Crater National Park,
National Army for the Liberation of Tanzania 58
Uganda (NALU) 273, 277 NGOs
National Commission on Culture, and culture bank model 236
Ghana 191 and policy formulation 50
Index 357
withdrawal from Eritrea 309 P

Nicholas, George 73 Pakistan 111
Nigeria 67, 114, 184 palanquins 185–187
Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) 135, 149 palm trees 138
Nile Valley 111, 137 Pan-Africanism 68
Nile Waters Treaty 133 Papastergiadis, Nikos 288
Nkrumah, Kwame 68 paramount chief, Agotime, Ghana
NMPDC. See National Memory and 184, 188, 190
Peace Documentation Centre Parsons, Neil 70
(NMPDC) ‘participant observation’ 241
Nobamba Traditional Authority pastoralist settlements 81–82
(NTA) 173 past versus present aspects of
Nomadic groups 140 ‘heritage’ 22, 29, 33, 146, 217,
North Africa 8, 70, 299 237, 270
North American ‘Indigenous paternalism 6, 26
archaeology’ 73 peacebuilding 32, 265–291
North Korea 314 Peace Corps 32
North-South Corridor 113 Pedersen, Jesper 318
nostalgia for colonial modern Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier 20
architecture 33, 298, 319 Peterson, Derek 283
‘notions of endangerment’ 6–7 Pikirayi, Innocent 6, 11, 202, 203,
Nubian monuments 110, 111 335, 336
Nuremberg Tribunals 269 Planetfinance (NGO) 252
Nyerere, Julius 68 Platinum Group Metals 114
poaching 52, 115, 120
Polihali Dam, Lesotho 210
O politics and heritage management 23
Obote, Milton 280 eMakhosini project, South Africa
O’Brien, Robert 237 174–176
okado (motorcycle taxis) 196 Eritrea 298
O’Kane, David 321 Gibe III Dam project, Ethiopia
Okavango Delta World Heritage Site 112
(ODWHS), Botswana, 51, 54, kente cloth, Ghana 181–187
56 Merowe Dam, Sudan 130–143
Oman 117 population growth rates 6, 9, 80
Ongoiba, Aissata 236 post-colonial heritage practices 4,
Ongwen, Dominic 270 104, 189. See also colonialism,
oral histories 76, 81, 222, 280 legacies of; decolonization
Oriental Institute, Chicago 142
358 Index
post-conflict reconstruction projects racial equality issues 207, 300, 321.

32, 33, 297, 298, 302, 306, See also colonialism, legacies of
310, 311, 319 Radcliffe, Sarah 206, 219
poverty 6, 108 rainforest ecosystems 81
and ‘development discourse’ 16, Ramsar Convention on Wetlands
206 (1971) 58
‘Fight Against Poverty’ (World Rausch, Christoph 33, 297–326
Bank) 236, 255, 256, 259 Global Heritage Assemblages,
and forced displacement 109, Development and Modern
135, 266 Architecture in Africa 306
and MDPs 127 reconciliation work, Uganda 266,
rates of in Africa 79, 140 269, 272, 277, 278
reduction strategies 70, 112, Red Cross 266
128, 297, 298, 303, 306–308, Redeker-Hepner, Tricia 321
310–312, 316, 319 Refugee Law Project (RLP) 271,
as threat to heritage sites 115 273, 278, 289
‘pre-colonial past’ 68 Transitional Justice Audit
Preventive Conservation in Museums (2011–2014), Uganda 266
in Africa (PREMA) programme Regional Economic Communities
255 (RECs) 113
Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Regional House of Chiefs, Ghana
Development 273, 290 185
‘pristine’ cultures/landscapes 21, 57, relocation of people. See
80 displacement of people
private sector, Eritrea 308 ‘rescuing’ heritage 4, 111, 144, 147
property evaluations for relocations research, areas requiring further 73,
168 79, 80, 158, 334
protests against displacement 139, research-based heritage management
164, 166, 167 59, 60
Pwiti, G. 335 resettlement. See displacement of
people
restitution, archaeology’s role in 203,
Q 204, 207
Qangqatho Committee negotiations retraumatization, in Travelling
with Amafa 164, 167, 169 Testimonies exhibition 276
Rhodes Must Fall movement 204
Robert, Yves 249
R rock art, South Africa 204, 212, 215
Rabinow, Paul 299 Romania 303
Index 359
Rostow, W. 237 Sinclair, Paul 82

Ruggles, D.F. 146 skills transfers
Rwanda 105, 270 of heritage crafts 27, 181–183,
Rwenzori region 278, 279, 282 192
Rwenzururu Rebellion, Uganda 273, between heritage professionals
277, 278, 280, 281, 283 212, 213
through ‘indigenous knowledge’
64, 65, 68, 74, 108
S slave trade 9, 76, 86
Sachs, A. 275 Smith, Laurajane 63, 65, 86, 88,
sacred groves 82 214
SADC. See Southern African Smits, Lucas 208
Development Community social media 187
(SADC) ‘social multilateralism’ 237, 241, 257
SAHRA. See South African Heritage socioeconomic impact of heritage
Resources Agency (SAHRA) management 7, 204, 206, 220
Samuels, Kathryn Lafrenz 65, 70, Somalia 321
215 South Africa 21, 30, 105, 106, 113,
SAPS. See South African Police 114, 116–118, 158, 160, 221
Service (SAPS) Limpopo Province 332
SAQA. See South African Mapungubwe 66, 116
Qualifications Authority MARA Programme 211, 212,
(SAQA) 214, 217
Saudi Arabia 135 transforming archaeology in 202,
savannah ecosystems 81 203, 207
Schmidt, P.R. 4, 6, 11, 18, 24, 74, South African Heritage Resources
335 Agency (SAHRA) 158, 220,
scientific expeditions 10 221
‘scramble for Africa’ 10, 300 South African Police Service (SAPS)
Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania 115, 164, 166
116 South African Power Pool (SAPP)
Sen, Amartya 237, 252 107
Senghor, Léopold 68 South African Qualifications
Serengeti National Park, Tanzania 58 Authority (SAQA) 220–221
Sheffield, UK 86 southern Africa 47–53, 56, 59, 222,
Shepherd, Nick 74 223, 335
Sicomines 114 see also individual countries
Sierra Leone 114, 195
Silverman, H. 146
360 Index
Southern African Development definitions of 239

Community (SADC) 107, nature-culture dichotomy in 23,
113, 203 28, 108
South Korea 84 promises of heritage to deliver 59
South Sudan 132, 270, 291 Sustainable Development Goals 104,
Soyinka, Wole 267 112, 120, 237, 254, 257, 332
spiritual heritage ‘sustainable interpretation’ of
artifacts 235, 236, 242, 244 landscapes 59
sites of 171, 178 Swaziland 22
sponsorship, international 208
of culture bank model 235–237,
240, 241, 253, 255 T
of Travelling Testimonies exhibi- Taha, Shadia 25, 30, 127–147
tion, Uganda 266, 268, 273, takienta (tower house) 245–247
277 Taneka, Benin 241, 244, 245, 247,
see also aid, foreign 247
Sri Lanka 111 Tanzania 58, 68, 111, 114, 115
Stacey, Tom, Tribe 280 technicians, credentialing of 206,
state sovereignty 33, 257 212
Eritrea 297, 298, 306, 312, 315, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
317 106
Stauffer, J. 285 Tesele, Taole 208
stereotypes of ‘Africa’ 9, 11 The Economist 5
Stiglitz, Joseph 239 Three Gorges Dam, China 107, 112
Strategic Urban Development Plan, TJ. See transitional justice (TJ)
Asmara 320 Togo 184, 236, 237, 241, 246, 248
‘structural adjustment plans’ 256 Toro Land Act, Uganda (1932) 279
Sudan 84, 85, 111, 130–143 totems 253
South Sudan 270, 291 tourism industry 5, 334
Sudan Archaeological Research Asmara, Eritrea 297, 314, 320,
Society (SARS) 136–137 322, 323
Sudanese Antiquities law 141, 144 branding of ‘Africa’ by 5
sustainable development 15, 16, cultural heritage used to promote
19–23, 29 49, 51, 65, 85
and conservation 48, 57, 104, and culture bank model 32, 235
107, 109 and Ebola crisis 195
culture as key to 108 nature tourism, southern Africa
culture bank model 237, 241, 49, 51, 54, 59
258 traditional justice mechanisms 270
Index 361
Traditional Leaders, South Africa 31, Uganda National Council of Science

173 and Technology (UNCST) 279
tradition and modernity 14, 16, 85, uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park,
183, 187 South Africa 158, 171
traditions, invention of 249 UNESCO 319
trainee heritage managers 210 African World Heritage Fund 7
Transformation Charter (ASAPA, Culture for Development
2008) 207 Indicators (CDIS) project
transformation plans 21–22
as economic policies 105 Hangzhou Conference 257
and empowerment issues 203, and Nubian rescue project 110,
207, 220 111, 130
within academic disciplines 71, Proclamation of the Masterpieces
202, 206, 207 of Intangible Heritage (1997)
transitional justice (TJ) 33, 265, 183
268, 269, 273, 289 on ‘sustainable development’ 20
Transitional Justice Audit World Decade for Cultural
(2011–2014), Uganda 266, Development (1988–1997) 20,
275 301
trauma narratives 285 see also World Heritage List;
Travelling Testimonies exhibition, World Heritage Sites
Uganda 33, 266, 268, 273, UNESCO Conventions 17
274, 277, 283, 287 Biological Diversity (1992) 58
trees, symbolic significance of 108 Protection and Promotion of
Tripartite North-South road network the Diversity of Cultural
113 Expressions (2005) 17, 144
Truman, Harry S. 256 Safeguarding of the Intangible
truth commissions 265 Cultural Heritage (2003) 21,
Tugume, David 287 58, 144
Turkey 135 World Heritage (1972) 58, 339
TVA. See Tennessee Valley Authority United Nations Declaration on the
(TVA) Rights of Indigenous Peoples
(2007) 75
‘Unity in Diversity’, Ghana 190
universalization
U of cultural heritage 254–256
Uganda 105, 265–291, 274, 283, of traditional justice mechanisms
285, 287 270
Uganda Crimes Division 270
362 Index
UNMEE, expulsion from Eritrea see also individual countries

307 wetlands, policy formulation on 58
UN Millennium Development Goals Wherry, Frederic 240
(MDGs) 237 ‘wilderness’, southern Africa 29, 47,
‘unsettled histories’ 76 49–52, 57
unskilled labor in excavations 222, wildlife conservation. See nature-
223 culture conservation
UN Sustainable Development Goals dichotomy
120, 237, 332 Williams, P. 267
urban expansion, impacts of 82, 83 Wiredu, K. 337
USA 106, 267 Wolfensohn, James D. 236, 301
US Federal Highway Administration women’s cooperatives 236
(FHWA) 127 World Archaeological Congress
(WAC) 145
World Bank
V and culture bank model 236, 240,
Vele Colliery, South Africa 118 255, 258
Venetia Diamond Mine, South on culture in development 302
Africa 118 and dam projects 129
Verhoeven, H. 132 in Eritrea 297, 302
Vernières, Michel 242 human development indicators in
Virunga World Heritage Site, DRC Africa 8
116 Implementation Completion and
visual art, Travelling Testimonies Results Report 307, 310, 314
exhibition 285, 288 World Decade for Cultural Devel-
opment (1988–1997) 20,
301
W World Energy Council 107
Wallerstein, Immanuel 256 World Heritage List 7, 8, 117, 243,
Warren, C. 112 247, 257, 298, 304, 311, 339
water management World Heritage Sites 58, 104, 107,
histories of irrigation systems 78 241, 334
impact of urbanisation on 83 and mining projects 66
see also dam projects Asmara, Eritrea 297–306
weaving heritage, Ghana 192–197 Bandiagara, Mali 250
West Africa eMakhosini Valley considered for,
culture bank model 235–240, South Africa 159
258 Koutammakou, Togo 236, 241,
urban expansion rates 82–84 244, 245, 246
Index 363
Lake Turkana, Kenya 112 Y

Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia Yattara, Aldiouma 240
111–112 Yilmaz, A. 287
Mapungubwe, South Africa 66, Yohannes, Zemeret 313, 315
116 Yunus, Mohammed 240, 253
natural World Heritage Sites 107,
116
Okavango Delta, Botswana 54 Z
Selous Game Reserve, Tanzania Zambia 114
115 Zimbabwe 52, 105, 335
uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park, Zimbabwean National Museums and
South Africa 158 Monuments Act 335
World War II, and memorialization Zulu history 163, 174
267 Zulu, Prince Gideon 173

African Heritage Challenges: Communities and Sustainable Development

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GLOBALIZATION, URBANIZATION AND

Caroline Wanjiku Kihato

More information about this series at

Globalization, Urbanization and Development in Africa

Cover image: © Stephen Lioy/Alamy Stock Photo

Heritage Challenges in Africa: Contestations

Managing Africa’s Anthropocene Environment

Needle in a Haystack? Cultural Heritage Resources

African Cultural Heritage and Economic Development:

Heritage and/or Development—Which Way for Africa? 103

Communities and the Quotidian

Mega Developments in Africa: Lessons from the Meroe

Heritage and Sustainability: Challenging the Archaic

The Antimonies of Heritage: Tradition and the Work

Transformation as Development: Southern Africa

African States and the Transnational Development

The Culture Bank in West Africa: Cultural Heritage

Exhibition Making as Aesthetic Justice: The Case

Modern Nostalgias for Sovereignty and Security:

Epilogue: Whose Heritage, Whose Development? 331

Charles Arthur has worked extensively as a professional field archaeol-

State ESRC funded research project; an AHRC funded Early Career

the Matatiele Archaeology and Rock Art program in 2011 at Charlie

winning two scholarships under the Cambridge Commonwealth Trusts.

Heritage: The Incorporation of Cultural Protection into Peacekeeping

Christoph Rausch is an associate professor in the Humanities and

Shadia Taha obtained a B.A. (Hons) in Archaeology from the

Needle in a Haystack? Cultural Heritage Resources in

African Cultural Heritage and Economic Development:

Fig. 3 Traces of early Dogon villages immediately below Tellem

Mega Developments in Africa: Lessons from the Meroe

Fig. 8 Proposed dams on the River Nile–Sudan (Source African

Heritage and Sustainability: Challenging the Archaic

The Antimonies of Heritage: Tradition and the Work of

Transformation as Development: Southern Africa

The Culture Bank in West Africa: Cultural Heritage and

Fig. 4 A display case in the Togolese Culture Bank featuring

Exhibition Making as Aesthetic Justice: The Case of

Needle in a Haystack? Cultural Heritage Resources in

African Cultural Heritage and Economic Development:

Heritage and Global Trends

© The Author(s) 2021 1

which alter both landscapes and notions of ownership and belonging

as well as natural diversity. Given the plurality of landscapes, communi-

the volume also includes contributions from non-Africans working in

Heritage Challenges in Africa

tribal anarchy, civil war, political instability, flagrant corruption, incom-

The Socioeconomic and Political Pressures

Temporally, Africa’s heritage spans from the origins of humankind to a

continent (90 sites in sub-Saharan Africa and 41 sites in North Africa)

vii). While population growth slowed in much of the world, in Africa

as the audience for these endeavors (Ndoro et al. 2018). Development

these distinct, although sometimes overlapping, approaches continue to

In Africa, the concern with the community relevance of heritage finds

heritage than we see, for example, in Europe—from which the dominant

Heritage and (Sustainable) Development

this in part reveals an underlying ‘reluctance among heritage “profes-

of empire.’ Others, however, argue that former colonies in other parts of

corruption, etc. However, such strategies risk ultimately further weak-

sustainably over ecological and cultural concerns while community-based

investments, technical and institutional mutations are in harmony and

by changing and adapting and seeking a dynamic equilibrium within

which arise between different sustainability discourses and their accom-