Reclaiming Heritage

Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa

Ferdinand de Jong, Michael Rowlands, Ferdinand de Jong, Michael Rowlands

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315421117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Arqueología

Struggles over the meaning of the past are common in postcolonial states. State cultural heritage programs build monuments to reinforce in nation building efforts—often supported by international organizations and tourist dollars. These efforts often ignore the other, often more troubling memories preserved by local communities—markers of colonial oppression, cultural genocide, and ethnic identity. Yet, as the contributors to this volume note, questions of memory, heritage, identity and conservation are interwoven at the local, ethnic, national and global level and cannot be easily disentangled. In a fascinating series of cases from West Africa, anthropologists, archaeologists and art historians show how memory and heritage play out in a variety of postcolonial contexts. Settings range from televised ritual performances in Mali to monument conservation in Djenne and slavery memorials in Ghana.

Reconsidering Heritage and Memory

Michael Rowlands

Ferdinand de Jong

DOI: 10.4324/9781315421131-1

Studies of memory in Africa have consistently stressed the contested nature of such practices as commemoration, remembrance, and forgetting. State ritual and personal and group recollections are inevitably situated in a politicized context. Richard Werbner speaks of a ‘memory crisis’: in postcolonial Africa memory is full of contradictions between the grandiosity of state ceremonialism and popular memory (cf Mbembe 1992; Werbner 1998a). The literature suggests that popular memory is genuine, whereas state ceremony and monuments are mere spectacles of the State. It is undeniable that, as a consequence of colonialism and the impact of European derived models of nationalism, the State in Africa has a tendency to monumentalize itself. Such a policy is reinforced by UNESCO and other agencies that promote heritage technologies for the production of official pasts and futures. However, in this volume we are interested in how memory attaches itself to heritage in often unexpected ways. In this context, we discover a broader principle that modern heritage and memory share a common origin in conflict and loss. Monuments, museums, and memorials are inseparable from the powerful modern moods of nostalgia and longing for authenticity as well as escalating desires for roots and origins. Thus we ask what kind of memorialising tactics and strategies attach themselves to the technologies of heritage. Which memory politics emerge in the context of such more formal institutions and which memories remain hidden and, when deliberately denied, even repressed? The aim of this volume is to examine how heritage technologies are appropriated for the recognition of past suffering and the creation of futures of hope.

Memory and the Public Sphere

Uncertainty as a recurrent feature of colonial and postcolonial states encourages us to think that people who struggle to create particular futures from particular pasts do so in a context in which the public sphere is questioned as having any moral legitimacy. Personal acts of recollection are instead realized in other forms of collective remembrance and story telling (for example, Fabian 1996) or linked to social reproduction and the protection of ethnic identity against externally perceived threat (Cole 2005). The extent to which the public sphere exists and facilitates personal and collective memory in postcolonial Africa is therefore debatable. Remembering seems to occur in opposition to the public sphere.

Citing the ‘postcolonial memory crisis’ in Africa, Werbner claims that memory as public practice is underdeveloped in terms of nation-building, and what little there is has been severely disturbed by violence and corruption (Werbner 1998a). An alternative and less pessimistic view has stressed that, despite atrocities and economic deprivation, personal and collective memories have been pivotal in recovering from trauma and reasserting claims to particular futures (cf Guyer 2005). Both these views raise a common question of what resources are available to form memory out of events, to create a sense of concern with the past that promotes feelings of well-being in the face of its apparent opposite as well as acting as a source of power that promotes an identity politics and claims to restitution. Both points of view tend, however, to see this in terms of personal and collective acts defined in resistance to the public sphere (for instance, Burnham 1996; Cole 1998).

At present, therefore, a tension is established between local and personal collective memories and globalising and/or state-building acts of memorialism. But such a dichotomy is questioned by the way processes of collective commemoration emerged in the twentieth century and the manner in which these processes had direct effects in colonial and postcolonial Africa, projecting a sense of place through the reification of boundaries, land holdings, the identification of sacred sites, or the preservation of vernacular architecture. Discussions of a ‘politics of belonging’ also stress that allocation of rights to origins fits local collective memories in ways that, although threatening and violent, do assert the connections among the State, elites, and collective memory (cf Nyamnjoh and Rowlands 1998). Recent claims have also been made to the effect that memory objectified in material culture becomes an active agent with therapeutic powers. Memory as re-enchantment merges with recent work on trauma to promise recovery from loss and denial (Antze and Lambek 1996). This view would question whether memory is different in Africa. Lambek would see the past as something more than ‘remembered’ or interpreted in a ‘presentist’ sense, as also acting as a burden on the present (Lambek 2002). Moreover, the subjectivity of the person cannot be distinguished from the public and the private aspects but carries the burden of the past in any guise. Personal and collective memory pervades the public sphere.

Technologies of Heritage

As mentioned earlier, as a consequence of colonialism and the impact of European-derived models of nationalism the State in Africa has a tendency to monumentalize itself. By this we mean something more than investment in buildings, memorials, and a general monumental architectural landscape that sets apart the city as a place of cement, glass, and steel (cf De Jorio 2006). The tendency for states to create lieux de mémoire that help nation-building has a wider implication of creating deliberate landscapes of memory that will act as technologies for the reification of pasts and the creation of expectable futures for their inhabitants (Handler 1988; Huyssen 2003). There is a large literature on how official urban landscapes of memory act as stages for framing myths of national identity. Although relatively underdeveloped in Africa, architectural landscapes have been encouraged by the colonial and postcolonial State (Coombes 2003; De Jorio 2006). Studies of vernacular architecture have equally stressed the longue durée of physical form and the ability to absorb new materials (cement, glass, and so on) and material spaces into ‘traditional architecture’ in order to preserve habitual ways of organising domestic and public places relating to kinship and gender norms. Although there is considerable continuity in the architectural landscape, UNESCO policy in Africa has resulted in an opposition between tangible and intangible heritage, which has privileged the idea of an authentic Africa as performative rather than monumental.

UNESCO and other agencies promote technologies for producing pasts and futures, by which we mean archives, artefacts, ritual practices, performances, and material spaces. How these technologies affect individual projects of self-realization, and in particular the intangible nature of performative culture and everyday practices, is a major theme of this volume. Thus we raise the issue of how to preserve intangible heritage and how technologies of memory affect memory (cf Nas et al. 2002). We are interested in the way, on the one hand, the material world relates to technologies that reify experiences of the past into transcending categories and forces to which individuals and groups attach themselves in terms of their everyday needs. On the other hand, we also examine how these attachments take on lives of their own and result in unexpected memory politics that tend to ignore more pressing memory issues that remain hidden and, when deliberately denied, even repressed. Therefore, we need to explore the issue of which memories are privileged and which are repressed through heritage politics.

Moreover, we need to explore how the content of particular memorialising strategies relates to the technologies that produce them and/or acts to subvert and repress them. Some will be small scale, such as family genealogies and kinship traits; others will be embedded in large-scale internationally supported projects such as heritage sites, postconflict restoration projects, and development programmes. These memorialising strategies have in common the desire to preserve. They produce technologies that select some memories and memorial artefacts for preservation and reject others. The act of curating and collecting is therefore a pivotal technological act in preserving the past to gain a future. The social effects and (mis)recognitions that these create should be understood as a politics of self-realization.

Heritage versus Memory

Heritage is increasingly thought to offer recognition, in terms of a valuation of the cultural heritage of formerly colonized and underrepresented populations. Thus the study of heritage is now receiving increased attention from anthropologists who write with approval on co-curated heritage projects (Clifford 2004). However, the anthropological interest in heritage has also raised concern about the basic assumptions of the heritage project (Hylland Eriksen 2001).

To situate the current concern with the conservation of heritage, we begin by exploring the ideological origins that underlie the globalising aims of the UNESCO world heritage policy. The most recent convention – the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage – maintains the general consensus in UNESCO (that is, the 1972 Convention) that globalization and social transformation give rise to grave threats to (intangible) cultural heritage; hence the acknowledgment of a loss of cultural diversity and the need to provide normative rules to prevent this loss. The assumptions that cultural diversity is analogous to biodiversity and that there is a need for international regulations to prevent its disappearance are not seriously disputed. Only the United States and Israel refused to sign the last convention.

Although there are good reasons to assume that the preservation of cultural heritage and the practice of memory are incompatible projects, we discern a common concern in both. In the European debate on heritage in the 1980s, a tension emerged between heritage and memory as an opposition of external and internal memory. One of the GDAT debates in Manchester addressed this issue in terms of a discussion between historians and anthropologists on the propositions of Lowenthal’s The Past Is a Foreign Country (Ingold 1996; Lowenthal 1985). A model of the past defined as ‘difference’ from the present formed the basis for a debate in which the protagonists basically took on either an ‘historical approach’ or a ‘memorial approach’ to the past. In the former, Lowenthal argued for the ‘rise of heritage’ as inevitably bound up with the rise of science, the decline of religious authority, and the establishment of meta-narratives of progress and rationality. The museum and the creation of public monumental landscapes are credited as key emblems of modernity – they provide a sense of permanence to counter modernity’s experience of rootlessness, rupture, and displacement. According to Nora (1989), memory in this context is reflexively achieved through the creation of lieux de mémoires in contrast to a previous habitual memory that did not need to be named as such and existed in everyday ways of doing things. Heritage in this sense is therefore an expansive force built on the confidence of nation-building and sustained by a sense of loss. Heritage, archives, and museums are seen to evolve as a privileged space in which the sense of loss and disruption can be contemplated and assessed and finally cured.

In this context, we discover a broader principle that modern heritage and modern memory share a common origin in conflict and loss. Monuments, museums, and memorials are inseparable from debates about nostalgia and authenticity and escalating desires for roots and origins. Translated to an African context, the UNESCO paradigm encapsulates twin programmes around restoration, in particular, architecture, and conservation in particular measures to counter illicit trade in antiquities and art objects. However, a return to the past is always partial and incomplete. Restoring the past is insufficient without an accompanying decolonization of African history. Ann Stahl has recently documented how a writing of an African past by archaeologists includes Africa in a search of early human origins and yet excludes it in writing the archaeology of later world prehistory and history (Stahl 2004:8). Self-conscious attempts by African archaeologists to bypass colonial imaginations of African pasts and release ‘hidden voices’ are increasing and ever more critical of the imposition of foreign models (cf Chami 2006; Schmidt and Patterson 1996). Recent criticisms of the focus on tangible heritage favouring the restoration of monuments and landscapes (products of a Eurocentric definition of heritage) resulted in the adoption of a wider notion of intangible cultural heritage to include cultural practices and skills as well as objects and cultural spaces that communities/groups recognize as their cultural heritage. But the twin themes of restoration and conservation are essentially maintained within the wider paradigm of the archive that both restores and revitalizes heritage through formal and nonformal education.

UNESCO Heritage Politics in Africa

Archives require surveys and indexes to decide on principles of inclusion and exclusion, so it is perhaps not surprising that since the 2003 convention, over fifty national surveys of cultural patrimony have been instigated by various African states. Much of this identification has been far too late in terms of its stated aims to conserve and preserve. For instance, concerning Mali’s Inner Delta region, claims have been made that over 60% of archaeological sites show traces of looting and that the number increases every year by 5% (Bedaux and Rowlands 2001). But to whom does this matter? Presumably, not necessarily to those who loot – people who may have little alternative sources of income. However, cultural loss seems in a rather unexpected way related to cultural rights. According to Article 22 of the 1948 Universal Human Declaration, economic, social, and cultural rights are indispensable for human dignity and the free development of the personality. Such rights were to be realized through a national effort and international cooperation. Associating civic rights with cultural rights was affirmed once again in the 1976 Covenant: ‘The right to culture obliges public authorities to create the social and economic conditions which permit the effective exercise of this right’ (UN doc 1976 A/31/111). In the same period, the question of repatriation of cultural items to countries of origin arose in general assembly debates, in particular the recognition of the removal of cultural property under colonialism. In Africa, the Banjul charter – otherwise known as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, adopted by all heads of state in 1981 – reproduces almost exactly the UN convention on the right to participate in a cultural life, including the obligation by the State in Africa to promote and protect the morals and traditional values recognised by the community.

The link of cultural rights to community rather than citizenship in Africa has the consequence of promoting an association between cultural heritage and cultural rights. It has already been pointed out that this association, which has its roots in colonial rule,...