Reclaiming Heritage: alternative imaginaries of memory in West Africa ed. by Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands (review)

This is the second volume in a new publication series from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, that engages critically with Eurocentric definitions and values attributed to ‘cultural heritage’ and with the politics and agendas of the associated discourse. A principal aim of the series is to draw scholarly attention to ‘new, alternative, or parallel characterizations of heritage value’, highlighting the real need for preserving human dignity and human justice. Reclaiming Heritage, edited by anthropologists Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands, is the outcome of a panel session organized for the first European Conference of African Studies hosted at SOAS in 2005. The collection of essays focuses on West Africa and productively explores postcolonial practices and the possibilities of decolonizing heritage in a variety of cultural and politically charged settings.

Different heritage technologies – archives, artefacts, ritual practices, performances and material spaces – produce different ways of remembering, and they are strategically employed at local, state and global levels in the politics of identity and self-realization. The editors’ opening essay links current debates around these issues to the volume’s core concern with how heritage technologies are, and might be, appropriated by West African states and by ordinary citizens as a means to recognize (or conceal) past suffering and generate hope for a better future. De Jong and Rowlands flag up the tension between local or personal acts of remembering and global or state-building acts of memorialization, and they aptly problematize UNESCO’s division between tangible and intangible forms of heritage. Absolute distinctions drawn between inscribed and incorporated forms of cultural remembering (following Connerton) are challenged, and the editors instead promote more nuanced considerations of how these ways of remembering are mutually constitutive.

The remaining nine essays are divided evenly into three sections dealing in turn with the (often-fraught) relation between stories of origin and new imaginaries, materiality and conservation, and the politics of recognition and reconciliation (though in fact these themes recur in varying measure in nearly all the chapters). The list of contributors is dominated by anthropologists, including ones currently teaching in other disciplines. Their analyses are grounded for the most part in ethnographic fieldwork and their perspectives are informed by the local communities with whom they work. A few essays, however, are more appropriately labelled ‘thought pieces’. The first of these is presented by the series editor Beverley Butler – the lone non-West Africanist contributor. Butler’s writing on ‘memory work’ and the construction of ‘heritage imaginaries’ in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean excavates the history of the Western manoeuvres to control heritage discourse and examines the so-called ‘Africanist turn’ inspired by such counter-colonial writers as Fanon and Diop. This early chapter is intended to open a space for contemplating key theoretical and ethical concerns raised throughout the book, but perhaps it attempts too much in the given space. Butler’s mix of post-structural, psychoanalytic and material culture theory, and her heavy use of opaque terms in single quotes, unfortunately risks losing the non-specialist reader.

Chapters 3–10 offer colourful accounts and thoughtful analyses of the negotiations and struggles to designate, define and control heritage. A diversity of locations, communities and practices include the touristic sites along Ghana’s slave routes (Schramm); photography and a Yoruba sacred grove in Osogbo (Probst); Kankurang masquerade for urban audiences in Senegambia (de Jong); Baga farming communities in post-socialist Guinea (Sarró), and cotton trees, murals and gravesites as sites for mediating peace in post-war Sierra Leone (Basu). Of special personal interest is the concentration of essays on Mali. Charlotte Joy’s study illustrates the incongruence between institutional strategies for conserving Djenné’s mud buildings and the reality of residing in a poverty-stricken town. She persuasively argues that programmes for preserving tangible heritage need to incorporate...