This edited volume presents valuable considerations of heritage in colonial and postcolonial Africa, with a particular focus on Ghana and South Africa. The book is the result of the ‘African Heritage Initiative’, which facilitates scholarly exchanges between the University of Michigan and universities in Ghana and South Africa. As a consequence, many of the authors in this volume are based on the continent, and the volume gives insight into the state of affairs of heritage research there.
In the introduction, Derek R. Peterson lays out the historical evolution of heritage cultures, emphasizing their intimate connections to political cultures. With origins in the ethnographic ordering of colonial museum practices, broadly defined, and connections to colonial political systems, like indirect rule, and cultural projects, like the fetishization of ‘authentic’ African tradition, heritage discourses were both challenged and reinforced in the nation building efforts of the 1960s. That is because those nations often appropriated colonial institutions and architecture of heritage work for postcolonial purposes. By the 1990s, Peterson argues that a different logic dominated, one in which commodification and commercial cultural production shaped the heritage industry, while the national museums of an earlier era languished. The cases Peterson draws on most in his introduction to the volume are from Ghana, Uganda, and South Africa, although he acknowledges the latter country's particular history presents a variation on the historical chronology that prevails elsewhere.
At its core, the volume aspires to ‘show 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 a patrimony’ (3). The individual contributions highlight the processes whereby heritage – and, by extension, the cultural identities of the past and present – are constructed, edited, silenced, and contested.
As is often the case with edited volumes, some contributions support this framing better than others, but overall the individual chapters clearly engage with one another. Most chapters focus on a particular heritage object (monuments, languages, human remains, etc.) in either Ghana or South Africa. The book opens with a chapter by Daniel Herwitz in which he reflects on how state and civil society position themselves in relation to narratives of heritage in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly around issues of reparation, recovery, and redress. It pays specific attention to the tensions that operate between the activist legacy of some South African universities, and the growth of neoliberal and privatized heritage industries. Next, Gary Minkley and Phindezwa Mnyaka focus on the South African Duncan Village Massacre Memorial Statue as a site for struggles over representation and memorialization, highlighting local versus national agendas and the differing visual economies on which these were built. Leslie Witz and Noëleen Murray use the history of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum in a former migrant hostel in order to probe competing interpretations of migrant labour and its heritage, as well as to explore conflicting expectations about the appearance and site of the museum. The next two chapters focus on monuments and heritage production in Ghana. Kodzo Gavua discusses the heritage landscape in Ghana by examining the fate of the Nkrumahist monuments in Accra, which were selectively refurbished and reappropriated in the 2000s. He also draws on other sites, such as the slave castles, to discuss the relation between memorialization and changing political prerogatives. Raymond Silverman considers the role of chiefs in the complicated efforts to memorialize spaces to the Atlantic slave trade in Ghana; he delves into the motivations behind these efforts, as well as the transformations in established discourse that this process entails.
Ciraj Rassool's contribution on bodies and human remains connects the threads of scientific empires, global circulation, human rights, and contemporary physical anthropological research. He explores how the institutional infrastructures of racial science and other colonial categories haunt the modern memorial complex in South Africa, yet his chapter also reveals the new opportunities for engagement that are embedded in these institutions and complexes. Death and its remains, in other words, emerge as a point of connection. In his chapter, Mbongiseni Buthelezi details how shifting narratives about pre-Zulu and Zulu identity and heritage provide a forum for debate over existing historical narratives in the political context of contested Zulu hegemony. Calamities are the focus of Kwesi Yankah's contribution, which considers how severe traumas are memorialized in oral cultures, particularly among the Asante, where silence sometimes enshrines certain events like the death of a king. Judith T. Irvine's chapter is an outlier in the sense that it relies on two different examples that are not Ghanaian or South African. Using the examples of ‘Ibo’ and ‘Serer’ language groups in current-day Nigeria and Senegal, respectively, (the author places the names in quotes to distance herself from the hegemonic work such categories terms perform) Irvine explores issues of language and ethnicity in relation to nineteenth-century notions of purity. The latter, she argues, has shaped an image of a ‘natural linguistic heritage’, which has in turn exercised a long-term influence on scholarship. The topic of language continues with Mary Esther Kropp Dakuba's chapter, which investigates the ways the Gã and Farefari in Ghana use (multiple) languages to overcome marginalization and slave ancestry.
Moses N. Nii-Dortey employs a 1960s Ghanaian folk opera as a point of departure to discuss how regional arts and cultural forms were deployed under Nkrumah as a tool to create a unified national culture (and suppress regional ambitions). Litheko Modisane analyzes whether black-centered (but not black-made) film can be mobilized as a form of heritage in the post-colony, using the example of the 1940's African Jim, a movie set in black Johannesburg. In the conclusion, Carolyn Hamilton writes about the ways in which Nelson Mandela and his remains, his words, and his legacy have become sites for heritage work. She uses this perspective to reflect on heritage in Africa more broadly, and reminds readers that heritage's ‘resistance to singular and straightforward specification alerts us to its location in the eye of the storm of post-coloniality’ (254). In effect, heritage can be a tool for authoritarian rule, yet it can also be employed to contest hegemonic power. It constitutes its own form of archive, to be reckoned with by historians.
This rich volume forms a new addition to the developing field of heritage studies in Africa, building and expanding upon previous edited volumes such as Peter R. Schmidt and Roderick J. McIntosch's Plundering the African Past (1996) and Ferdinand de Jong and Michael Rowlands’ Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Memory in West Africa (2007.) It invites but does not impose comparison, and gives a sense of heritage studies as a field of research but also as a ‘complex’ in flux, particularly in South Africa. We learn less about how the international dimensions of heritage work have influenced the sector (in the guise of, for example, UNESCO regulations and interventions), but the volume constitutes a call to take up the study of heritage ‘work’ across the continent, and to further probe the various ways it can be constituted, used, and contested.
