Heritage and memory in East Africa today: a review of recent developments in cultural heritage research and memory studies

Abstract

This article argues that the broadening over time of definitions of heritage has had strong implications for researchers working in East Africa today. Moving away from material preservationist issues of concern to governments and international heritage bodies, most scholars have recently focused their research on the entanglement of heritage with memory, politics, identity, and social healing processes. They also increasingly investigate the growing agency and centrality of civil society stakeholders, as well as the negotiation of power and authority between the different levels -local, national, international -involved in heritage making and heritage promotion. Focusing on the case of slavery and the slave trade, the rise of civil society engagement, and the contestations that continue to swirl around the commemoration of liberation heroes, the article depicts how heritage and memory have become a site of struggle -symbolically, ethically and emotionally charged -in today's East Africa.

Multivocality and Its Implications for the Representation of Heritage: A Case Study of the Slavery Heritage in Mikindani, Tanzania

“…In fact, the organization of the urban space in Mikindani is suffused with hierarchy, displacement and the people's struggle to belong there amid shifting hierarchies, to the extent that some wenyeji pride themselves on being descendants of immigrants-albeit high-status, not enslaved, ones (McIntosh, 2009, in Becker, 2021Bissel 2011). This amnesia-based notion is common in most slavery heritage sites along the Swahili coast (see Becker, 2021;Fouéré & Hughes, 2015;Mapunda, 2007). In fact, a limited engagement of the local communities in the heritage-making process has left slavery among the community as the subject of silence and shame (Klein, 1989).…”

“…Cultural heritage might seem to be tranquil but is intrinsically embedded with variant narratives and experiences, also known as multivocality. As a result of the widening of the democratic space, cultural heritage has become a complex political phenomenon and a site of social struggles that generate contests, resistance, opposition, complicity and compliance (Fouéré & Hughes, 2015;Kisic, 2013;Lwoga, 2018;Smith, 2006). Cultural heritage management (CHM) authorities could privilege certain vocals over others, thereby fuelling social conflicts and symbolic violence, including the destruction of heritage (Ashworth et al, 2007).…”

Archaeologies of the Recent and Contemporary Past in Africa

“…One could argue that heritage studies make a focus on this intersection of time and power more explicit than contemporary archaeology, and include within their disciplinary ambit an exhortation to devote equal attention to exploring this power and the temporalities with which it is concerned (cf. Ndoro, 2001;Coombes et al, 2014;Fouéré and Hughes, 2015;Giblin, 2018).…”

“…Ethnoarchaeology's concern with how insights develop from presentday (typically indigenous) communities provides insights into understandings of material culture both now and in the past. Heritage studies fundamentally focused on the role of the past in the presentwhether as a tangible object, discourse, commodity, or something elsehave produced a veritable wave of scholarship from archaeology, history, anthropology, art history, and other fields over the past few decades (see, e.g., Fouéré and Hughes, 2015;Peterson et al, 2015). Both heritage studies and public or community archaeology have foregrounded the centrality of disciplinary self-reflection in articulating what archaeology can do in modern Africa, in terms of providing 'usable' information to support peoples' livelihoods and illuminating lived experiences that had gone unnoticed under earlier disciplinary paradigms (e.g.…”

#Bookfairs: New ‘old’ media and the digital politics of Somali literary promotion

“…New media technologies also facilitate the popular archiving of 'tradition', and can empower 'non-official' actors to challenge dominant narratives (Pietrobruno, 2013). In regions such as East Africa, civil society plays an ever-increasing role in heritage industries, in both collaboration and competition with state authorities (Fouéré and Hughes, 2015). As such, the digital tools at citizens' disposal become important for understanding how these processes unfold, and the further blurring they may encourage of boundaries between state and non-state agency.…”