Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa

272 Pages·2008·1.966 MB·English

by  Ferdinand De Jong, Ferdinand De Jong

RECLAIMING HERITAGE
PUBLICATIONS OF THE
INSTITUTE OF ARCHAEOLOGY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
Director of the Institute: Stephen Shennan
Founding Series Editor: Peter J. Ucko
The Institute of Archaeology of University College London is one of the oldest, largest, and most
prestigious archaeology research facilities in the world. Its extensive publications programme
includes the best theory, research, pedagogy, and reference materials in archaeology and cognate
disciplines, through publishing exemplary work of scholars worldwide. Through its publications,
the Institute brings together key areas of theoretical and substantive knowledge, improves
archaeological practice, and brings archaeological findings to the general public, researchers, and
practitioners. It also publishes staff research projects, site and survey reports, and conference
proceedings. The publications programme, formerly developed inhouse or in conjunction with
UCL Press, is now produced in partnership with Left Coast Press, Inc. The Institute can be
accessed online at www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology.
ENCOUNTERS WITH ANCIENT EGYPT Subseries, Peter J. Ucko, (ed.)
Jean-Marcel Humbert and Clifford Price (eds.), Imhotep Today
David Jeffreys (ed.), Views of Ancient Egypt since Napoleon Bonaparte
Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice (eds.), Consuming Ancient Egypt
Roger Matthews and Cornelia Roemer (eds.), Ancient Perspectives on Egypt
David O’Connor and Andrew Reid (eds.), Ancient Egypt in Africa
John Tait (ed.), ‘Never had the like occurred’
David O’Connor and Stephen Quirke (eds.), Mysterious Lands
Peter J. Ucko and Timothy Champion (eds.), The Wisdom of Egypt
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURAL HERITAGE Subseries, Beverley Butler (ed.)
Beverley Butler, Return to Alexandria
Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands (eds.), Reclaiming Heritage
Dean Sully (ed.), Decolonizing Conservation
OTHER TITLES
Andrew Gardner (ed.), Agency Uncovered
Okasha El-Daly, Egyptology, The Missing Millennium
Ruth Mace, Clare J. Holden, and Stephen Shennan (eds.), Evolution of Cultural Diversity
Arkadiusz Marciniak, Placing Animals in the Neolithic
Robert Layton, Stephen Shennan, and Peter Stone (eds.), A Future for Archaeology
Joost Fontein, The Silence of Great Zimbabwe
Gabriele Puschnigg, Ceramics of the Merv Oasis
James Graham-Campbell and Gareth Williams (eds.), Silver Economy in the Viking Age
Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton, and Chris Tilley, Stone World
Andrew Gardner, An Archaeology of Identity
Sue Hamilton, Ruth Whitehouse, and Katherine I. Wright (eds.), Archaeology and Women
Gustavo Politis, Nukak
Sue Colledge and James Conolly (eds.), The Origins and Spread of Domestic Plants in Southwest
Asia and Europe
Timothy Clack and Marcus Brittain (eds.), Archaeology and the Media
Janet Picton, Stephen Quirke, and Paul C. Roberts (eds.), Living Images
Tony Waldron, Paleoepidemiology
Eleni Asouti and Dorian Q. Fuller, Trees and Woodlands of South India
Russell McDougall and Iain Davidson (eds.), The Roth Family, Anthropology, and Colonial
Administration
Elizabeth Pye (ed.), The Power of Touch
John Tait, Why the Egyptians Wrote Books
RECLAIMING HERITAGE
Alternative Imaginaries of Memory
in West Africa
Ferdinand de Jong
Michael Rowlands
Editors
Walnut Creek, California
LEFT COAST PRESS, INC.
1630 North Main Street, #400
Walnut Creek, CA 94596
http://www.LCoastPress.com
Copyright © 2007 by Left Coast Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-59874-307-4 hardcover
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

Reclaiming heritage : alternative imaginaries of memory in West Africa
/ Ferdinand de Jong, Michael Rowlands, editors.
p. cm. — (Critical cultural heritage series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59874-307-4 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Cultural property—Africa, West. 2. Cultural property—Africa,
West—Protection. 3. Memory—Social aspects—Africa, West. 4. Africa,
West—History. 5. Africa, West—Antiquities. I. de Jong, Ferdinand.
II. Rowlands, M. J.
DT473.R43 2007 966—dc22 2007034207
Printed in the United States of America
∞™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
07 08 09 10 11 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Illustrations 7
Series Editor’s Foreword 9
Acknowledgments 11
1 Reconsidering Heritage and Memory 13
Michael Rowlands and Ferdinand de Jong

Old Origins, New Imaginaries
2 ‘Taking on a Tradition’: African Heritage and the 31
Testimony of Memory
Beverley Butler
3 Slave Route Projects: Tracing the Heritage of 71
Slavery in Ghana
Katharina Schramm
4 Picturing the Past: Heritage, Photography, and the 99
Politics of Appearance in a Yoruba City
Peter Probst
Materiality and Conservation
5 Entangled Memories and Parallel Heritages in Mali 127
Michael Rowlands
6 ‘Enchanting Town of Mud’: Djenné, 145
A World Heritage Site in Mali
Charlotte Joy
7 A Masterpiece of Masquerading: Contradictions of 161
Conservation in Intangible Heritage
Ferdinand de Jong
6 Return to Alexandria
Recognition and Reconciliation
8 From a Glorious Past to the Lands of Origin: 185
Media Consumption and Changing Narratives of
Cultural Belonging in Mali
Dorothea Schulz
9 Demystified Memories: The Politics of Heritage in 215
Post-Socialist Guinea
Ramon Sarró
10 Palimpsest Memoryscapes: Materializing and 231
Mediating War and Peace in Sierra Leone
Paul Basu
About the Contributors 261
Index 265
Illustrations
Figure 2.1 ‘Plato’s Obelisk’, Ain Shams, Cairo 47
Figure 2.2 The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, contemporary Alexandria 64
Figure 3.1 Garden of Reverence, Assin Manso 83
Figure 3.2 ‘Welcome to Salaga Slave Market’, Salaga 85
Figure 3.3 Moru Kuala, elder of Gwollu, posing in front 88
of the Defence Wall in his father’s battle dress
Figure 4.1 Palace sculptures associated with local deities in Osogbo 102
Figure 4.2 Cement sculpture by Susanne Wenger and Adebisi Akanji 102
in the Osun grove representing Obaluaye, late 1970s
Figure 4.3 Road clearers with Osun devotee at Osun Festival 2002 104
Figure 4.4 Osogbo Heritage Council, History of Osogbo, 1994 108
Figure 4.5 Afolabi Kayode, Osun in Colours, 2006 113
Figure 4.6 Oba Atanda Olugbena Matanmi II, 114
early twentieth century
Figure 4.7 Part of the Ohuntoto Ogboni Shrine Complex, 116
erected by Wenger, Gbadamosi, Saka, and Akangbe
in the mid-1970s
Figure 4.8 Group of four cement figures by Adebisi Akanji 118
in the Osun grove
Figure 6.1 Traditional Djenné houses 152
Figure 6.2 Masons in Djenné at work applying the yearly 153
layer of mud needed to protect the houses
Figure 6.3 Fallen down house in Djenné 154
Figure 6.4 House covered in tiles in Djenné 155
Figure 6.5 Cement government building in administrative 155
district of Djenné
Figure 7.1 Kankurang and one of his cross-dressed ‘guardians’ 163
8 List of Illustrations
Figure 7.2 Cartoon in national newspaper Le Soleil: Kankurang 163
beating up a man who claims : ‘This is not a true
Kankurang. It’s Modou, whose brother
I disciplined yesterday’.
Figure 7.3 Cartoon in national newspaper ‘Le Soleil’ 166
Figure 7.4 Boys playing with their Kankurang 167
Figure 7.5 Detail by Omar Camara, oil on canvas 177
Figure 7.6 Kankurang as statuette 177
Figure 7.7 Performers with make-shift cameras 179
Figure 7.8 Performers performing as journalists 180
Figure 9.1 ‘Nimba’ (or d’mba) masquerade, Tolkoc, 2001 225
Figure 10.1 Handiwork of Child Combatants, 236
Simeon Benedict Sesay, 2000
Figure 10.2 Obverse and reverse of the 2004 Bank of 238
Sierra Leone 10,000 Leone note
Figure 10.3 Remains of the ‘Soldier Kill Rebel’ 243
monument erected by the NPRC in 1994 in Bo
Figure 10.4 Signboard advertising the 2003 renaming of 245
Freetown’s Congo Cross Bridge as ‘Peace Bridge’
Figure 10.5 Illustration from Wetin Na Di Speshal Kot: 247
The Special Court Made Simple, a booklet produced
by the Special Court’s Outreach Section in 2002
and distributed to Sierra Leonean schoolchildren
Series Editor’s Foreword
The aim of this Critical Perspectives on Cultural Heritage series is to define a new
area of research and to produce a set of volumes that make a radical break with
routinised accounts and definitions of cultural heritage and with the existing
or ‘established’ canon of cultural heritage texts. In a fundamental shift of
perspective, the French intellectual Jacques Derrida’s rallying call to ‘restore
heritage to dignity’ is taken as an alternative guiding metaphor by which this
series critically revisits the core question – what constitutes cultural heritage?
– and engages with the concerns (notably the moral-ethical issues) that shape
and define the possible futures of cultural heritage studies. A key objective of
this series is to be of transformative value in the sense of outlining and creating
new agendas within cultural heritage discourse.
This series of publications is therefore intended to provide the intellectual
impetus and critical framework by which cultural heritage discourse can
undergo a process of radical reflection and fundamental reconceptualisation
and engage in a subsequent reconstruction of its core heritage values, practices,
and ethics. Central to this project is an alignment with a wider scholarship
committed to disrupting the ‘Eurocentrism’ that continues to underpin cultural
heritage theory/practice and also with a contemporary ‘politics of recognition’,
which is bound up in articulating new, alternative, or ‘parallel’ characterisations
of heritage value. This commitment to produce a set of publications directed
toward reconceptualising cultural heritage studies within these alternative
intellectual, moral-ethical, and also grounded concerns is ultimately rooted
in calls for the centring of cultural heritage discourse within a wider concern
for the preservation of human dignity and human justice and to use these
alternative discourses as a resource for future action in terms of creating a
proactive (rather than reactive), responsive, and just future for a new critical
cultural heritage studies. The individual texts in this series are regarded as
building blocks in defining these new research futures.
As one of the first books in the Critical Perspectives on Cultural Heritage
series, Reclaiming Heritage critically addresses cultural heritage theory/practice
and technologies of memory-work in the specific context of West Africa. This
text is ground-breaking in its radical reconsideration of cultural heritage value
apropos the ‘postcolonial memory crisis’ and in its commitment to challenging
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