The Politics of Heritage in Africa

Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures

Derek R. Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, Ciraj Rassool

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781107094857
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316237397
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages of books, encoded in legal statutes, encased in glass display cases and enacted in the panoply of court ritual, the artefacts produced by the heritage domain have become a resource for government administration, a library for traditionalists and a marketable source of value for cultural entrepreneurs. The Politics of Heritage in Africa draws together disparate fields of study - history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema - to show how the lifeways of the past were made into capital, a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from. This book shows African heritage to be a mode of political organisation, a means by which the relics of the past are shored up, reconstructed and revalued as commodities, as tradition, as morality or as patrimony.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Epigraph
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Heritage Management in Colonial and Contemporary Africa
• 2 Heritage and Legacy in the South African State and University
• 3 Seeing Beyond the Official and the Vernacular: The Duncan Village Massacre Memorial and the Politics of Heritage in South Africa
• 4 Fences, Signs, and Property: Heritage, Development, and the Making of Location in Lwandle
• 5 Monuments and Negotiations of Power in Ghana
• 6 Of Chiefs, Tourists, and Culture: Heritage Production in Contemporary Ghana
• 7 Human Remains, the Disciplines of the Dead, and the South African Memorial Complex
• 8 Heritage vs Heritage: Reaching for Pre-Zulu Identities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
• 9 9/11and the Painful Death of an Asante King: National Tragedies in Comparative Perspective
• 10 Language as Cultural ‘Heritage’: Visions of Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century African Linguistics
• 11 The Role of Language in Forging New Identities: Countering a Heritage of Servitude
• 12 Folk Opera and the Cultural Politics of Post-Independence Ghana: Saka Acquaye’s The Lost Fishermen
• 13 Flashes of Modernity: Heritage According to Cinema
• 14 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index