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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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The Heritage Hunt: Reviewing the Namibian Landscape?
| Panel |
46. Shaping collections, producing alternative histories: The example of Namibia as a contested research entity
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| Paper ID | 669 |
| Author(s) |
Silvester, Jeremy
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The acquisition of heritage status is a claim to importance for a place or an object. Archive documents cluster around themes that serve as organizational magnets, that ascribe meaning and form to papers that have previously been dispersed through time and space. The acknowledgement of a place's significance can be provided at many levels - ranging from individual (a grave with personal meaning) to international (being crowned as a 'World Heritage Site' by UNESCO). One of the symptoms of national recognition as a heritage site, a place of significance, is that a site becomes a focus for documentation and research.
In Namibia, prior to Independence in 1990, a place was acclaimed as having significance by being proclaimed as a National Monument. However, the limited list of sites that achieved this status reflects a politics of recognition that reinforced an image of cultural hegemony by certain ethnic groups within Namibia. The white community that controlled the bodies responsible for selection placed a high emphasis on the built environment and generated projects that encouraged the generation of particularly profuse visual records of buildings from the early (German) colonial period.
The 'Heritage Hunt' is a project being run by the Museums Association of Namibia in partnership with the National Heritage Council which seeks to invite communities all over Namibia to provide information about the places in their local areas that they feel to be of importance. Often the places suggested are sites that are considered sacred in terms of community memory, but may not contain the tangible remains which have attracted western heritage status which has often been linked to a preservationist agenda. The paper argues that by providing a new recognition to a wide range of heritage sites the project is likely to generate further research and documentation that will lead to a significant shift in the shape of archival collections linked to heritage sites.
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