Politicians in the African postcolony often invoke memory and heritage to legitimate the state and to express a national identity. However, several anthropological studies have demonstrated that such sites of memory often fail to mobilise the population. The subjects of the state in fact embark on their own projects of memory, in defiance of the state’s project to create a national memory. This panel therefore addresses the question how sites of memory are contested in the struggle for a national memory. How is cultural heritage defined and publicly contested by political agents? In the postcolonial public culture, sites of memory may well by rallying points for the political imagination. Perhaps sites of memory should therefore not be understood as remnants of unreflecting memory, as Pierre Nora suggests, but as places for an emergent civic engagement. Which directions do these engagements show? Does an engagement with sites of memory suggest a vision for the future? How do embodied memories express political programmes? How is cultural heritage debated when the future is at stake?
Djenne is one of three world heritage sites in Mali, probably most well known for its mosque which is the largest mud architecture building in the world. Its World Heritage status is sustained by the presenceof a Cultural Mission in the town that supports the policy of the Malian state towards the preservation and restoration of national patrimony. The development of tourism is one goal. Another is to harness cultural heritage to the building of a national culture. These policies bring the state into conflict with the Imam who wishes to preserve Djenne as a centre of Islamic learning and also rebuild the mosque along more univeral lines. The building of a new museum in Djenne also encapsulates these tensions with the director of the cultural mission arguing for a modern building , the architectural restoration programme wanting to convert a traditional building and the Imam not wanting one at all. Local people mediate these different tensions in ways that express their own views of the outside and of the past.
The paper deals with the problematic relationship between public art and local memory in Osogbo, Nigeria. For this the paper will focus on the image works standing in the grove of Osogbo’s guardian deity, the Yoruba river goddess Osun. Both the grove and the image works constitute a national monument guarded by the Osogbo museum. Based on the analysis of the establishment of the Osogbo museum, the paper investigates the process of museal framing with respect to issues of cultural heritage, national culture and local notions of history and authority.
The postcolonial Ghanaian state has been developing a national cultural policy which supports ethnic festivals a as way of making heritage relevant to the creation of a national identity. Many of the new and influential Pentecostal churches have however remained hostile towards this national project, and conflicts frequently erupt. These confrontational auditory politics have become particularly significant in the context of the conflicts that have emerged concerning the bans on drumming and noise-making that certain ethnic festivals require, between groups that identify themselves as 'traditionalists' and the Pentecostals. Pentecostals in Ghana therefore regularly stand accused of public ‘noise-making’ and have been attacked by those defending periods of public silence. The Ghanaian government’s attempts to mediate in these auditory politics have proved futile. This paper explores this issue by highlighting the fact that the ‘noisiness ’ of Pentecostal groups is informed by moral and ideological choices that Pentecostalism prescribes for its members vis-à-vis cultural traditions or national identity. Cultural memory thus becomes a site of auditory contestation in the context of the modern Ghanaian nation-state.
In Ghana, the memory of the slave trade has long been excluded from public discourse. With the advent of heritage-tourism to the slave sites, this silence begins to dissolve. The paper focuses on the dynamic interplay of local, national and diasporan actors in the representation of the slave trade and their respective attempts to create meaning and a future from the violent and disruptive past.
Politicians in the African postcolony often invoke memory and heritage to legitimate the state and to express a national identity. However, several anthropological studies have demonstrated that such sites of memory often fail to mobilise the population. The subjects of the state in fact embark on their own projects of memory, in defiance of the state’s project to create a national memory. This panel therefore addresses the question how sites of memory are contested in the struggle for a national memory. How is cultural heritage defined and publicly contested by political agents? In the postcolonial public culture, sites of memory may well by rallying points for the political imagination. Perhaps sites of memory should therefore not be understood as remnants of unreflecting memory, as Pierre Nora suggests, but as places for an emergent civic engagement. Which directions do these engagements show? Does an engagement with sites of memory suggest a vision for the future? How do embodied memories express political programmes? How is cultural heritage debated when the future is at stake?
One of the vexing questions at the heart of the discursive tussles between dominant and oppositional discourses is the question of remembrance, of history – how to read it, interpret it and to claim a space within its territory. While dominant narratives strive to project a single authorized version of history, marginal discourses tend to mock hegemonic systems of thought by recuperating and representing repressed experiences as vital shards of history. At stake in these tussles is the power of representation, with memory as the arena of struggle. Using interpretive protocols derived from minority discourse theory, this paper seeks to examine how Ken Saro-wiwa’s On A Darkling Plain (1989) demoralizes dominant memory of the Nigerian civil war, by excavating subjugated memories of that unhappy event.
In this paper I explore the role of radio in creating and performing sites of memory which allow the subject to engage in multiple ways with the public sphere and the national imaginary. As differing sites of mediation in radio, I propose an examination of two genres both of which feature prominently on the SABC isiZulu language station, uKhozi FM (Black Eagle FM). Each offers listeners a means of referencing the past and situating themselves in a present that is both ‘of the nation’ and ‘of the world’. Each exploits linguistic and cultural memory but is situated firmly in the present. The first is the genre of serial radio drama which, possibly due to the social engineering of the apartheid state, was able to carve out for itself a unique niche as an emergent genre with the capacity, at times to capture the micro-politics of a particular historical and social moment which then played themselves out in listeners’ memories for some time after the play had ended. The issues explored in such plays (both in the apartheid and present era) frequently engage with questions of the public sphere such as morality, wealth, magic and power; these in turn impinge on the idea of the nation and inform the national imaginary.
The second site of mediation on radio is the sung and choreographed hybrid genre known widely as imbube or isicathamiya and popularised both as quintessentially South African, and as part of world music, by Joseph Shabalala and the Ladysmith Black Mambazo group. The genre has three weekly radio slots on uKhozi FM, and is performed regularly in venues all over KwaZulu-Natal and in Gauteng, usually in downmarket venues, and even in such unlikely places as an underground car park. It creates sites of memory which allow constant insertion of the listening and performing self in a stream of meditations on past, present and future. The broad scope of topics enables singers and composers to engage with differing levels of memory through the recursive gestures of song. The listening subject, or the audience, are allowed the chance to imaginatively reposition him/herself in the stream of history, popular memory, the present and future: figures such as Shaka, Nongqawuse the doomed Xhosa prophetess, the 9-11 disaster, and the AIDS pandemic are all engaged with and circulate as part of the discursive fabric of the genre and of the unofficial discourse of the public sphere. This feeds a stream of oscillating popular memory and popular knowledge into the national imaginary, one which may well be at variance with the official discourse of the state on the topic of sites of memory and their relation to public culture and ‘the nation’.
In post-independence Senegal in the early 1960s, folkloric performance was promoted as a crucial agent in the development of a national consciousness. The National Ballet was established in 1961 to reclaim a regional memory obliterated by colonisation. The explicit inspiration was poet Fodéba Keita and his ‘Ballets Africains’, who contributed widely to the national project in neighbouring Guinea. In Senegalese folkloric performance, regional traditions were filtered through the lens of the political project at hand, and the lives of such historical figures as Songhay ruler Askiya Muhammad were re-imagined for the stage. On the other hand the memory of the colonial origins of the genre, which can be traced through Fodéba Keita’s education at the William Ponty school or his artistic début in the 1930s Parisian scene, was conveniently suppressed.
Faced with the drying out of state patronage of the arts, in the past fifteen years Senegalese performers have experimented with new choreographic forms often labelled ‘contemporary dance’. There, memory is mobilized for the fulfilment of individual creativity and professional ambitions on the global stage, rather than as a cornerstone of the national project. Notions of ‘tradition’ are thus invoked to legitimise the role of the individual artist as a social critic. In examining the appropriation of different forms of memory by different generations of performers, this paper suggests that the Senegalese national project no longer resonates with the recent generations of city-dwellers.
Every year the Mouride brotherhood celebrates the 'Prayer of the Two Rakas' in Saint Louis, the former capital of colonial French West Africa. This commemoration remembers a prayer by the founder of the Mouride brotherhood Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba as an act of resistance against the French anti-Muslim policy. Every 5 September, thousands of pilgrims cross the bridge 'Pont Faidherbe' to attend the prayer in front of the Governor’s Palace. The pilgrims thus give specific meaning to the material remains of the colonial era. However, the same material remains are also valued as a “cultural heritage” of the colonial era, leading to the inclusion of Saint Louis to UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Through a series of visual juxtapositions, this paper examines the variety of meanings attributed to the material culture of Saint Louis. It will demonstrate that the re-enactment of the prayer expresses a civil engagement quite different from the conservative nostalgia expessed in the tourist experience.