Memory and Cultural Landscape at the Khami World Heritage Site, Zimbabwe

An Un-inherited Past

Ashton Sinamai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367586454
• eBook ISBN: 9781351022002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book focuses on a forgotten place—the Khami World Heritage site in Zimbabwe. It examines how professionally ascribed values and conservation priorities affect the cultural landscape when there is a disjuncture between local community and national interests, and explores the epistemic violence that often accompanied colonial heritage management and archaeology in southern Africa. The central premise is that the history of the modern Zimbabwe nation, in terms of what is officially remembered and celebrated, inevitably determines how that past is managed. It is about how places are experienced and remembered through narratives and how the loss of this heritage memory may mark the un-inheriting of place.

Memory and Cultural Landscape at the Khami World Heritage Site, Zimbabwe is informed by the author's experience of living near and working at Great Zimbabwe and Khami as an archaeologist, and uses archives and traditional narratives to build a biography for this lost cultural landscape. Whereas Great Zimbabwe is a resource for the state's contentious narrative of unity, and a tool for cultural activism among communities whose cultural rights are denied through the nationalisation and globalisation heritage, at Khami, which has lost its historical gravity, there is only silence.

Researchers and students of cultural heritage will find this book a much-needed case study on heritage, identity, community and landscape from an African perspective.

1Khami

An un-inherited past

Introduction

It is no secret that we human beings misremember the past. We forget the moments that make us uncomfortable, commemorate those that validate us, and make up everything in between. There are thus times when we need to unlearn some of what we think about our recent history in order to discover the interesting things that happened there.

(J. Steinberg, Sunday Times (South Africa), 16 December 2012)

In 1999, I transferred from Great Zimbabwe to the Khami World Heritage Site in Zimbabwe to lead the conservation and development programme at the archaeological site. I had worked at the Great Zimbabwe World Heritage Site for five years, gaining specialised skills in the conservation of dry stone walls and the management of World Heritage properties. After a very successful conservation programme at Great Zimbabwe, many conservation reports on Khami recommended the transfer of skills to the site to arrest the deterioration that it was experiencing (Joffroy, 1998; NMMZ, 1999). A senior traditional stonemason and I were moved to Khami as part of that skills transfer to create a similar conservation programme. The move was triggered by the inclusion of Khami on the World Monuments Watch’s 100 Most Endangered Sites List of 1996. The listing came with a grant for the development of a conservation, research and development plan for the site.

Khami is the second largest Zimbabwe Culture site after Great Zimbabwe and marked the spread of complex state systems on the Zimbabwe plateau. It is, indeed, one of the three Zimbabwe Culture sites (with Great Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe, South Africa) that have been inscribed on the World Heritage List. Its architecture, composed mainly of dry stone platforms is a departure from Great Zimbabwe’s architecture which features mainly free-standing walls (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1The Hill Complex at Khami World Heritage Site

Source: A. Sinamai

The Zimbabwe Culture is an archaeological culture that marks the development of complex state systems in southern Africa. It is identified mainly by the development of cities built of dry stone walls. The major settlements of this civilisation include Mapungubwe (South Africa), Great Zimbabwe, Khami, Danamombe, Naletale (Zimbabwe), Manyikeni (Mozambique) and Domboshaba (Botswana). Archaeologists have identified a host of heritage values at Khami but this has not changed its fortunes in terms of conservation and management. Built on an area of about 450 hectares, the site is a series of highly decorated stone-built platforms on which houses were constructed. It was nominated a ‘national monument’ in 1935 on the strength of its archaeological value as well as its aesthetic, historical and scientific values. Later, it was also inscribed on the World Heritage List on the strength of its architectural and archaeological values. However, while Great Zimbabwe has had teams of professional conservators over a very long period, Khami has been languishing in obscurity and general neglect. The identified national and global values have not forced the state to create a management regime that is effective enough to slow down the decay of the cultural landscape. Khami is a forgotten and secularised landscape.

The purpose of this book is to understand forgotten cultural heritage places and the processes of forgetting itself. It uses the Khami World Heritage Site as a case study of places that have fallen off the radar locally and nationally but are celebrated as global heritage due to their monumentality. The book also argues that the history of the nation and how that history is celebrated, as well as the current contexts in which a heritage place finds itself, determines how that heritage place will be managed. I also examine how places become more important icons for the national narrative than others and how this affects the management of a nation’s heritage sites in general. In doing so, the book contributes to the global literature on the relation between universal/national/local heritage and memory and identity. It will also contribute to best practice in heritage management in Zimbabwe, a nation that is deeply divided politically and culturally and has so far failed to take advantage of its diversity.

Moving from Great Zimbabwe, where the national government and local communities constantly monitored and critically assessed every process, the first thing I noticed was the lack of any sort of pressure from stakeholders. There were also no signs of any serious commitment from National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ), the quasi-government organisation responsible for the management of heritage places in Zimbabwe. At Great Zimbabwe I was also a local, having been born five kilometres away from the site and being a descendant of the last traditional custodian of the site. I had grown up on stories of the sacredness of the Great Zimbabwe from my grandmother who had lived at the site with her father, Chief Haruzivishe Mugabe of the Duma clan, the custodians of the site in the late 1890s. As a local resident and a professional archaeologist, I had the privilege of having access to both NMMZ’s inherent perceptions about the heritage place and to the dissonant voices of the local communities. The subject of concern for local communities was how the sacredness of the place, ownership, access, presentation and conservation were managed by the government, while the NMMZ as the government representatives were more concerned with the conservation of the physical remains and avoiding conflicts that arise between communities that laid claims to the site. Furthermore, NMMZ was also interested in making the site accessible to tourists and constantly portrayed communities as threats to the integrity of the place. Heritage managers, with the backing of the power of the state, hardly acknowledged that they were part of the problems that caused conflicts between themselves and these communities. For local communities, NMMZ was just an extension of state governance, as it depended on the same colonial government laws to control the communities’ interaction with Great Zimbabwe.

In the same process, I also realised that the conservation programme at Great Zimbabwe had barely prepared me for the conservation work at Khami, as the architecture of the structures was somewhat different. After embarking on restorations, the stonemason and I both realised that the complexity of the walls at the Khami World Heritage site required an innovative conservation approach. Extrapolating conservation approaches developed at Great Zimbabwe did not give the expected results in Khami’s context. I came to understand that the physical context of the place was just as important as the conservation knowledge of the site and that this extrapolation was a pointer to the need for different care programmes for these two heritage places as well as a different approach to heritage issues at Khami.

I became aware of the fact that a World Heritage Site can have a plethora of values given to it by professionals, but if those values do not reverberate with a local or national narrative, its state of conservation will remain precarious. Khami, a Karanga/Kalanga site in an area with recent shifts in populations and identities, land ownership and vicious colonial and postcolonial conflicts, has not been ‘inherited’ and this had led to its poor management and a lack of commitment in conserving the landscape. The partisan celebration of national heritage that ignores the feelings and contribution of the ‘other’ to the national narrative have also led to indifference. This work shows how the state’s need for a single national narrative has contributed to the loss of immaterial heritage within the Khami landscape.

The assumption heritage theory makes is that when a site has ‘values’ it will be conserved. In reality, a heritage place may have many important heritage values inscribed by experts but these will not guarantee its inclusion in collective memories or influence how it is preserved. Heritage theory claims that heritage values trigger conservation action in the first place. But Khami shows that places can only be heritage when they express the value of certain groups in the society (Giaccardi & Palen, 2008: 282). In other words, values are context-dependent and certain cultural settings seem to privilege the production of one type of heritage more than another (Klamer & Zuidhof, 1998: 24). When a place is recognised as ‘cultural heritage’ by experts, heritage protection and preservation does not always begin. Many heritage institutions attempt to de-politicise conservation through concentrating on the technical issues of preservation and management (Smith, 2004; Logan, Langfield & Nic Craith, 2010: 17) but conservation is a social and political process (Avrami, Mason & de la Torre, 2000: 5). Conservation of heritage places, therefore, is not evaluated and interpreted objectively but is a result of a process of mediation, defined by different social and political factors like cultural rights, contexts and societal trends and economics (Avrami, Mason & de la Torre, 2000: 7).

This process of heritage production creates a centre and a periphery in which heritage places are ranked according to their importance to the dominant ideologies. Some heritage places are more pronounced, while others are deliberately subdued. Heritage thus has to be considered as a mental presence on a landscape as well as a physical entity. When that mental presence on a landscape is missing, it is difficult to argue for the conservation of that heritage place though it may still be regarded as important for its generic nature (Pierce, 2000: 60). Khami has been relegated to this periphery and has lost ancestral and national audience. The contradiction is that, although Khami is in this cultural periphery both locally and nationally, it was nominated for and subsequently inscribed on the World Heritage List.

According to NMMZ’s National Monuments lists, Khami is the second most important cultural heritage place in Zimbabwe. It is also a World Heritage property, a status that is viewed with a sense of pride by the government. Nomination for World Heritage status was mainly determined by the need to emphasize the nation’s narrative based on the stone built palaces of ancient kings. The name ‘Zimbabwe’ is an anglicised version of Dzimbabwe, literally means houses of stones (palaces) and this may have influenced nomination of more of these sites on the World Heritage List. This has not, however, translated into high-profile research about conservation, nor has it been a narrative resource. Since its ‘discovery’, there has only been one major publication on the archaeology of Khami (Robinson, 1959) and there has been very little research (e.g., Summers, 1967) on its architecture and its conservation. This book fills in this gap in research in management and conservation and argues that the position in which the Khami World Heritage Site finds itself has been pre-determined by the political, social and economic priorities of Zimbabwean governments over the years. Developing this argument entails the assessment of conservation history of sites in Zimbabwe, particularly Khami, as well as the research agendas of scientists and the political expediency of the state. The focus on the conservation and research of Great Zimbabwe and other selected sites is culturally deliberate and this has relegated sites like Khami, a site that has been recognised as having universal values, to the margins of commemoration.

The values that are present at Khami are largely ignored when they come into competition with national values that prioritise ‘national unity’. Khami marks a point of division in the ancient Great Zimbabwe state through a civil war (into Mutapa in the north and Torwa at Khami), an issue that the new narrative of unity avoids. Its celebration is thus subdued, as the state does not want these narratives to destabilise the ‘unitary state narrative’ that it celebrates. These issues have not received much attention by researchers who have mainly concentrated on heritage places that relate to these national projects. With the economic, social and political problems that Zimbabwe is experiencing today, these issues need to be examined, as they will still affect how the nation that will emerge out of the current crisis will commemorate its heritage places like Khami, as well as minority heritage places.

The book is about how places are remembered through narratives (ancient and modern) that are told about them and how the loss of these narratives may mark the un-inheriting of place. When a heritage place ceases to represent or inspire narratives both local and national, or shape the behaviour or opinions of people that are supposed to connect to it, it becomes un-inherited. The result of that process brings about the loss of a heritage place and this is the central focus of this book. Khami is silent (regionally and nationally) with no narratives, no religion, no implicit politics, conflicts or memorialisation. It is this state in which the past myths of the landscape are forgotten and no new narratives are inspired by it. Khami thus becomes an un-inherited place, with a local community that has forgotten it and a nation that is not inspired by its story and has narratives based elsewhere. This silence at and around Khami reinforces the ideas I had already developed at Great Zimbabwe (see Sinamai, 1998) that attempts to define and commemorate a collective past that is always contested by other local pasts and local identities, and that the celebration of a heritage place depends on factors connected to identity, territory, and international, national and local politics.

An analysis of Khami demonstrates how the act of forgetting is significant to the process of remembering. Unlike Great Zimbabwe, Khami is neither a sacred landscape nor an ersatz marker, and its World Heritage status does not guarantee funding from the government for conservation, nor the community to be vocal about its impoverished state of conservation. This book critically analyses the creation of local and national memory in Zimbabwe and examines how the current national collective memory and politics influences what is valued, managed and preserved and what is forgotten. Using Khami as an illustrative and powerful case study, this book will contribute to literature on forgotten places.

The book investigates the creation of national memory in Zimbabwe and examines how the current national collective memory influences what is valued, managed, preserved and presented to the world. It revisits and analyses the criteria for existing rationale in identification, nomination, management and conservation of national monuments and World Heritage sites in Zimbabwe. It also examines how issues of site context, culture and cultural change, identity, cultural diversity, cultural and human rights have shaped management policies of heritage sites like the Khami World Heritage Site. With a past that is marked by racial and ethnic conflict, this kind of study feeds into issues of resolving conflict, identity and cultural rights in Zimbabwe and may offer lessons for conflict resolution at heritage sites elsewhere.

Several questions underpin this book. Is the lack of interest in Kalanga/Shona heritage from the largely Ndebele groups that live close to Khami, a knee-jerk response to the hegemonic Shona national narrative? Is the site not significant enough nationally and was it just nominated to World Heritage status as part of a range of symbols to ‘franchise’ national heritage to international audiences and show the ancientness of the new nation to the world? What part have the ‘three spheres’ of conservation (Avrami, Mason & de la Torre, 2000: 7)—culture, politics and economics—played in the neglect of Khami? Is the conservation of Khami held back to free resources to preserve heritage places that promote diversity? Does a skewed interpretation of national history and academic bias lead to disproportionate emphasis on some heritage places? Is there a narrative powerful enough to gather sufficient resources for the Khami site to be appropriately managed, conserved and developed?

Besides the loss of its integrity through neglect, the stories and myths linking communities to Khami have also disappeared. However, sustainability of heritage is not only a physical effort but is a part of an ideology that is supported by a ‘metaphor network’ represented by these stories and myths. Heritage management in Zimbabwe, however, concentrates on preserving the physical remains without the recognition of the narratives and stories associated with heritage places. This study therefore explores the conditions necessary to engage in acts of remembering within the local communities, as well as within the national narrative.

One of the major issues that arise when dealing with heritage, nationalism, national narratives and cultural diversity is that there is very little literature that deals specifically with African countries. The Khami World Heritage Site itself hardly has any literature, with just a single book published in 1959 and a few guidebooks meant largely for tourists. The site has not attracted either internal or external researchers and this has resulted in the lack of publications about the site. This book, therefore, had to depend largely on materials in the archives of cultural institutions in Zimbabwe, as well as interviews that I carried out in those institutions along with members of the public. Newspaper articles, especially from the recent years when politics was polarised, provided a window into the thinking of those who created the dominant narratives. On the other hand, the lack of publications on Khami means that this book has the potential to become a major source of information on this World Heritage site. More importantly, however, it shines light on how far heritage sites can become disinherited when the multiplicity of cultures are ignored in defining territory, and what measures can be taken to address a situation where a globally celebrated site is neglected through a selective celebration of national heritage. This neglect is not only physical but a mental abandonment that is created through ruptures of a series of state systems that changed identities and new perceptions of heritage in western Zimbabwe. Khami is thus not only a construct of the colonial government, but an accumulation of cultural ‘debris’ of several entities that established themselves in western Zimbabwe.

2Placing Khami

The Zimbabwe culture

The Zimbabwe Culture is an archaeological tradition that describes at least five political entities representing Karanga/Kalanga (Shona) kingdoms, which succeeded each other for a period of over a millennium and extended from the Kalahari Desert fringes to the coastal areas of Mozambique (Pikir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• List of acronyms
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• 1 Khami: An un-inherited past
• 2 Placing Khami: The Zimbabwe culture
• 3 Locating Khami: Culture, politics and global setting
• 4 Nationalising the past, internationalising the present
• 5 Un-inheriting Khami: The conservation process
• 6 Un-inheriting Khami: The socio-cultural process
• 7 Cultural negotiation and creation of a shared narrative at Mapungubwe
• 8 Khami: The lost landscape
• Bibliography
• Index