Challenges to Identifying and Managing Intangible Cultural Heritage in Mauritius, Zanzibar and Seychelles

6. Violence and Compromise: Zanzibar

6. Violence and Compromise: Zanzibar Le passé n’est pas mort, ce n’est même pas passé25 Introduction In 2000, UNESCO nominated Stone Town (Unguja’s main port city) a World Heritage site. Three years later, at the UNESCO General Conference in Paris (in October 2003), the 120 members voted unanimously for a new international convention aimed at the protection of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), defined as music, tales, rituals, systems of folk knowledge and epics. To date, existing cultural organisations in Zanzibar have not taken the initiative to identify local ICH for the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In this chapter, I document some of my research findings in Zanzibar, focusing on violence and globalisation as two challenges to ICH identification and management26 on the islands. I argue that these have contradictory effects on ICH in Zanzibar and need to be critically reflected upon by those interested in heritage preservation and promotion. In one sense, both are disruptive and have the potential to suppress particular cultural forms. However, responses to these may also encourage and sustain cultural forms and modes of cultural transfer. One response, ‘cool politics’ (basically an openness to exchange, bricolage and hybridisation), often seen as a barrier to ICH identification, has made space for violence in the creation of creolised and ‘mixed’ cultural forms. I argue that any consideration of ICH preservation in Zanzibar needs to include reflection on the role of this complex and violent history in social interaction and cultural expression . Are UNESCO’s current approaches to tangible and intangible heritage feasible in this complex and precarious social world? Challenges to the Management of Intangible Cultural Heritage 56 Let me begin by arguing that being ‘subaltern’ produces particular experiences of violence (in its different forms) and encourages specific strategies to respond to violence. For example, my own life experiences (in Mauritius and Malawi) helped me to notice (even if at least on a very superficial level) the salience of everyday violence and some of the very different ways in which people were dealing with it in Zanzibar. Initial conversations with residents suggested that structural and political violence is an important source of suffering that can impede meaningful engagement in social life. Closer observation is revealing that social suffering (as a sort of extended post-traumatic stress disorder ) continues to affect social interaction and expression in a more fundamental way. Viewed from afar, it is not only ritual or musical expressions that are contributingtotheperpetuationofthisstateofaffairs .Memoryprojectsimplemented by heritage regimes provide the tangible form through which such violence can be remembered and re-inflicted. As an outsider, I experienced a sort of indirect terror by visiting the dark cells underneath the Anglican Church (built on top of the old slave market in the heart of Stone Town) or whenever I walked past the police building, Mambo Msiige, in Stone Town. The foundations of the latter are said to be filled with the bodies of slaves who were buried alive there, as it was believed that human blood strengthened foundations. Thus in encouraging the sustenance of slave architecture and history, slave descendants are regularly made painfully and violently aware of their history of victimisation, are expected to accept it as ‘their’ history and to encounter it ‘cold’. As Dirk Hoerder points out in his discussion of subalterneity, the subaltern is expected to ‘observe closely, to learn and to fit in’ (2003: 26). Thus ‘cool’ politics is not about compromise, it is a way to accommodate violence and oppression and to resist it without incurring further direct violence. In the following, I argue that heritage managers need to be thoroughly aware of the complex interplay between violence and globalisation and the unique social dynamics that it might produce in ‘exotic peripheries’. A first step would involve a critical review of the concept of heritage. Heritage in Stone Town The nomination of Stone Town as a World Heritage site occurred rather late in the history of heritage preservation. UNESCO’s concern with heritage can be traced back to the 1972 ratification of the Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, a normative and standard-setting instrument for the management of heritage. Since then, more than 721 sites have been inscribed on the World Heritage list. However, they are mostly ‘tangible’ herit- Rosabelle Boswell 57 age(monuments,archaeologicalsites,museums)andaretobefoundoverwhelmingly in Europe and North America. As Bouchenaki reports in...