Global Heritage Assemblages

Development and Modern Architecture in Africa

Christoph Rausch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367193058
• eBook ISBN: 9781315414959
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

UNESCO aims to tackle Africa's under-representation on its World Heritage List by inscribing instances of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern architecture and urban planning there. But, what is one to make of the utopias of progress and development for which these buildings and sites stand? After all, concern for 'modern heritage' invariably—and paradoxically it seems—has to reckon with those utopias as problematic futures of the past, a circumstance complicating intentions to preserve a recent 'culture' of modernization on the African continent.

This book, a new title in Routledge's Studies in Culture and Development series, introduces the concept of 'global heritage assemblages' to analyse that problem. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork, it describes how various governmental, intergovernmental, and non-governmental actors engage with colonial and post-colonial built heritage found in Eritrea, Tanzania, Niger, and the Republic of the Congo. Rausch argues that the global heritage assemblages emerging from those examples produce problematizations of the modern', which ultimately indicate a contemporary need to rescue modernity from its dominant conception as an all-encompassing, epochal, and spatial culture.

Part I

Prologue A Cult of Heritage

Since 1972, the UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage is the gospel of what the historians Françoise Choay and David Lowenthal independently from each other call a cult of heritage: “a newly popular faith whose shrines and icons daily multiply and whose praise suffuses public discourse”.¹ An epiphanic moment in this cult of heritage was the construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt.

The Aswan High Dam is a modern development project that could be said to be archetypical of the 20th century. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the second president of Egypt since it gained its independence in 1952, made the decision to once and for all tame the floodings of the river Nile immediately following his inauguration in 1956. Aiming to add on to dams built by the British colonial powers in 1889, 1912 and 1933, Nasser commissioned the new dam in order to produce the hydroelectric power deemed necessary for the industrial development of a newly independent nation-state. A large reservoir would ensure access to drinking water across the country, as well as feed a new system of agricultural irrigation.

In 1954, the Egyptian government had already made a request for a loan from the World Bank for a planned dam. The World Bank, however, cut off this funding when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956. In turn, Nasser accepted assistance to build the Aswan High Dam from the Soviet Union, raising Cold War tensions in the region. Still, neither the military invasion of Egypt by the United Kingdom, France and Israel in the wake of the Suez crisis nor the 1967 Six-Day War or the War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt between 1969 until 1970 stopped the Egyptian government from pursuing efforts to build the new dam. Construction of the Aswan High Dam was completed on July 21, 1970, shortly before Nasser’s death in September that year.

By 1976, the Aswan High Dam was to create an enormous artificial lake—Lake Nasser. This, however, did not only mean the promise of autonomous economic development for Egypt, the rise of the Nile waters also meant environmental devastation, the inundation of human settlements and the displacement of their populations. Moreover, the reservoir threatened to destroy ancient monuments. Indeed, Lake Nasser would eventually be as wide as 25 kilometers in some areas, flooding the Nile valley over 300 kilometers up into Egyptian Nubia and even some 200 kilometers into Sudanese Nubia. As a result, its waters would submerge dozens of temples and historic sites, the cultural value of which had been cemented by centuries of colonial archaeology.

Soon the Egyptian and Sudanese governments realized the importance of the Nubian monuments for their purposes of nation building. For example, Nasser stated,

We pin our hopes on the High Dam for the implementation of our plans of economic development; but likewise we pin our hopes on the preservation of the Nubian treasures in order to keep alive monuments which are not only dear to our hearts—we being their guardians—but dear to the whole world which believes that the ancient and the new components of human culture should blend in one harmonious whole.²

Thus, in 1959, the Egyptian ministry of culture approached the young United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, founded in 1946) with a request for “active material, technical and scientific assistance in the design and execution of projects to save the monuments of Nubia”.³ The Sudanese ministry of education joined this call for “the judgment of history” when it submitted its own appeal for international cooperation in the same year.

At the time, UNESCO was already active in Egypt as, immediately following political independence, the intergovernmental organization had established the Documentation and Study Centre for the History of Art and Civilization of Ancient Egypt in Cairo. This center of expertise—a legatee of colonial archeological services—focused on the photographic and photogrammetric documentation of the Nubian monuments.⁴ In the face of looming material destruction, however, UNESCO deemed exclusive documentation insufficient. When it became clear that the Aswan High Dam was definitely going to be built, the appeals by the Egyptian and Sudanese governments to devise measures to save the “stone treasures”⁵ of Nubia from the floods saw a swift response from the UNESCO member states.

In 1960, shortly after the official inauguration of the construction works on the Aswan High Dam’s foundations, UNESCO’s director general Vittorino Veronese presented the 55th session of UNESCO’s Executive Board with a proposal to safeguard the ancient Nubian monuments. In dramatic prose, Veronese’s appeal explains his perception of the dilemma at stake:

Work has begun on the Aswan dam. Within five years, the Middle Valley of the Nile will be turned into a vast lake. Wondrous structures, ranking among the most significant on earth, are in danger of disappearing beneath the waters. The dam will bring fertility to huge stretches of desert, but the opening of new fields to the tractors, the provision of new sources of power to future factories, threatens to exact a terrible price.⁶

Veronese viewed the inundation of Nubia as a special challenge for modern development, stating, “It is not easy to choose between a heritage of the past and the present well-being of people, living in need in the shadow of one of history’s most splendid legacies; it is not easy to choose between temples and crops.”⁷

UNESCO was convinced that “[m]odern needs and modern technology may compel and produce the [Aswan High Dam] but the Present cannot afford to squander the Past”.⁸ Its monthly magazine, UNESCO Courier, maintained that

[t]he twentieth century has become an age of startling transformation, and its changes everywhere on the planet threaten the heritage of the past on which man’s cultural life depended. […] But, in protecting our common artistic heritage, there must be a worldwide feeling of responsibility.⁹

Veronese called for “services, equipment and money” to “save the threatened monuments” of Nubia in their material authenticity.¹⁰ He urged the member states of his international body to consider that “treasures of universal value are entitled to universal protection”.¹¹ It was “now or never”, as the UNESCO Courier headlined: Social and economic progress was to be paired with “cultural and spiritual progress”.¹²

Swiftly following Veronese’s appeal, the director general was authorized to set up and chair an International Action Committee. Initially, this committee was split into two, an Executive Committee constituted of formal representatives of 15 member states, as well as an Honorary Committee of Patrons. The latter panel was chaired by King Gustav Adolf VI of Sweden and included Queen Elizabeth of Belgium, Queen Frederika of Greece, Princess Grace of Monaco, Princess Margrete of Denmark, Prince Mikasa of Japan, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Dag Hammerskjold, André Malraux and Julian Huxley. Soon, however, there were complaints that a legitimate heritage authority had to have scientific expertise in the fields of archaeology, Egyptology, and historic preservation. An additional Consultative Committee was set up in response, as well as an advisory Panel of International Experts. In 1961, UNESCO’s Department of Cultural Activities formed a specialist Service for the Monuments of Nubia, which bundled the various initiatives.

Originally, Veronese had identified the challenge of the Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia as one of “bringing to light an as yet undiscovered wealth for the benefit of all”.¹³ Yet, the “generous response” from the UNESCO member states, which Veronese requested in his original appeal to UNESCO’s Executive Committee, must be seen against the backdrop of an Egyptian and Sudanese vow to grant unlimited access to foreign archeological expeditions. Veronese literally announced “a new era of marvelous enrichment” in the field of Egyptology:

In return for the help the world gives them, the governments of Cairo and Khartoum will open the whole of their countries to archeological excavation and will allow half of whatever works of art may be unearthed by science or by hazard to go to foreign museums. They will even agree to the transport, stone by stone, of certain monuments of Nubia.¹⁴

The internationally orchestrated safeguarding campaign would mark a new era of enrichment indeed, as particularly the collections of European and American museums, already filled with colonial trophy from Egypt, would see valuable new additions.¹⁵

Nevertheless, the multimillion-dollar Nubia campaign was in the “donor states” above all advertised as a humanist mission to preserve cultural heritage in situ. As a consequence, the UNESCO Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia sparked a general interest in the preservation of cultural heritage abroad. A popular travelling exhibition of pharaonic treasures that visited the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Belgium, the USSR, Canada and the US drew thousands of visitors. Press representatives were treated to a Nile cruise that included on-board tutoring on Nubia’s archaeology, history and cultural heritage, generating substantial media coverage in the process. The challenge taken on by an international team of engineers to raise the whole temple of Abu Simbel by 200 feet in order to save it from the raised water level particularly fascinated a foreign audience.¹⁶

Upon the definite flooding of Nubia in 1964, René Maheu, Veronese’s successor as UNESCO director general, celebrated the Nubia campaign as a “victory for cultural co-operation”, as well as an affirmation of mankind’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index