Heritage Challenges in Africa: Contestations and Expectations

When the ‘Asset’ Is Livelihood: Making Heritage with the Maritime Practitioners of Bagamoyo, Tanzania

“…Our research was, after all, funded by a network that 'aims to identify in what ways the tangible submerged and coastal heritage of Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar, and its associated intangible aspects, can stimulate ethical, inclusive and sustainable community development in the region' ( [87], p. 1026). This situates our project squarely within a longstanding global (and ideological) trend identifying heritage as a 'resource'-in this case for social and economic 'development' ( [18], p. 2). Our funding therefore came with the presumption that some notion of 'maritime cultural heritage' would have resonance and value among low-income communities whose very breadwinning activities constituted the object of our knowledge-creation prospectus.…”

“…We discern within this trend towards underwater archaeology the extension into East Africa of the epistemological tentacles of modern, globalised and professionalised maritime archaeological theory and praxis that Baillie and Sørensen [18] have noted with a broader African heritage context in mind. What this trend promises for heritage practitioners is clear: it produces new operational realms in which professionals can practise and perform their competence and expertise-in effect, generating or augmenting professionalised lifeways for formally constituted interpreters and narrators.…”

“…. is pulled in different directions by various agents', each with their own agenda, as Baillie and Sørensen observe in a broader African context ( [18], p. 3), but which could equally apply globally. Nowhere is this tension truer than in Bagamoyo, where proposals for a massive complex comprising an international port and associated industries and tourist facilities-the Bagamoyo Special Economic Zone (BSEZ)-continue to hang over the community, promising opportunity for some and upheaval for others, but change for all (see below).…”

Rwandan solutions to Rwandan problems: Heritage decolonization and community engagement in Nyanza District, Rwanda

“…At the same time, neither is a radical excision of Western-style heritage legacies required, according to others: “What does not work is a strategy that flows from an ‘anything-goes-as-long-as-it-is-local’ or an ‘anything-does-not-go-as-long-as-it-is-Western’ approach” (Chirikure et al, 2017: 2). Instead, they call for an informed process of selection which is responsive to local conditions, or what Baillie and Sørensen (2021b, 3) label a “local tailor-made response.”…”