Heritage places — Ancestral abodes
Jesmael Mataga, Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley, South Africa
While substantial work has been done in linking local communities to heritage, mainstream, western disciplinary approaches to heritage studies have missed the complex nuances related to heritage significance in Africa- especially the complex links between local communities, their ancestral connections and how this influences how communities think of, produce, reproduce, protect and use natural and cultural heritage. For the “non-expert” communities, the mundane, the simple, and perhaps the ordinary takes central position in heritage valued. In this brief reflection, I take from the example of Zimbabwe to show how heritage places lend themselves to being confounded as sacred, ancestral places, by local communities. The anecdote is a simple mud, pole and thatch hut (Figure 1), located within one of the largest Zimbabwe-type archeological sites in Southwestern Zimbabwe. Recorded during my fieldwork in 2011, the simple mud and pole hut, almost a curious insertion in the middle of a declared archaeological site (National Monument No.68), points to the complex interactions between what experts emphasize as “heritage”, against the local communities’ conceptions thereof. Built and used by a local spiritual leader, the hut encapsulates one of the longstanding issues related to Zimbabwe-type archaeological sites, dotted across Southern Africa.
According to the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ), Ntabazikamambo/Manyanga, located to the north-east of Bulawayo (Zimbabwe’s second largest city), has a long history of occupation, and archaeological investigations have shown that the site was occupied throughout most phases of Zimbabwe history. However, of more significance in its long history of occupation is the fact this site became the seat of one of the longer lineage of rulers in Zimbabwe- the Rozvi Mambos/rulers. Ntabazikamambo/Manyanaga developed as a religious and spiritual center of the Mwari (Mwali) religious system, linked to a network of shrines including Njelele in the Matopos World Heritage landscape (Clarke 2008). Thus, Ntabazikamambo/ Manyanga was the seat spiritual leaders who became involved in earliest resistance to colonial establishment in the last decade of the 19th century. Acknowledged by heritage experts predominantly for their archaeological and scientific significances, for local communities, these sites are sacred places, shrines and the abodes of ancestors (Chirikure 2020; Ndoro 2005, Fontein 2006).
Image 1: A Ritual Hut at the Nthabazikhamambo (Manyanga) Archeological monument, southwestern Zimbabwe. (Picture taken by author in 2011).
What we could take from the anecdote and the discussion above is how local communities’ connections to spirituality, ancestors and ritual practice influence the production of heritage in Zimbabwe, imploring us to acknowledge, and work with them. A crucial point of reflection is what would the discourses and practices of heritage look like if experts begin, in earnest, to foreground spiritual values embedded in these sites? Attempts to respond to these complex questions has been a consistent feature of my recent research and work on heritage in Southern Africa (cf. Mataga 2024, 2023).
Rethinking Heritage in Africa
By spiritual dimension, I refer to local religious and spiritual beliefs and practices, which shape how local communities see, use and preserve sites. For many, natural and cultural heritage sites/places in Africa, local communities invoke their religious and ritual practices to claim heritage sites. The invocation oftentimes unsettles official/expert notions of heritage as material or as having national and/or universal value. The examples in Southern Africa are many-from Thulamela (South Africa), Mapungubwe (South Africa), Great Zimbabwe or Khami (Zimbabwe) archaeological sites. The persistent claims by local communities confirm the importance of the spiritual and ancestral motifs, in how local, non-expert communities produce, use, and promote heritage. As Ndoro (2005) articulated, while heritage experts see these sites as “monuments” of universal scientific importance, to the local populace, these places are “their shrines”- places where their ancestors are interred and where local rituals and other religious practices are performed. Recently, Chirikure (2020), has suggested that Africa needs to reclaim its “confiscated past”. This “confiscation’ has been a result of decades of colonial and western inspired knowledge production and heritage practices that marginalized local ways of knowing, and the spiritual associations to archaeological and other heritage sites on the continent. At Great Zimbabwe, informal reports are indicating the insertion in the last few years, of what has been deemed as the “spiritual center” within the world heritage site - reportedly occupied by selected spiritual mediums endorsed by the ruling elites. No matter how we look at this, it confirms what a lot of academics, researchers and cultural leaders have said for so long, namely that beyond their scientific or universal significance, these heritage sites have consistent, and longstanding links to spiritual and symbolic values.
The persistence of claims to sites based on spiritual associations, may seem peculiar to the Zimbabwean context. However, such claims are prevalent all over Africa. Perhaps what is important now, as many African heritage specialists have insisted on, is to ask what opportunities, forms of engagement and new relational dynamics could emerge, if we shifted gaze from the experts to the communities?
(un)disciplining heritage: recalling ancestors
Globally, there have been several initiatives that seek to invite communities back into the heritage practices. Organisations like ICCROM have agitated for a “spiritual/sacred heritage as part of living heritage and “people centred” heritage (Wijesuriya 2017, ICCROM 2015), developments in Africa have always centred the inseparability of the material and the spiritual, and hence the importance of ancestral heritage as points of engagement. For Africa, and elsewhere in the so-called global South, the spiritual and ancestral motifs are central to the processes of reversing the historic, but continuing disavowal of local knowledge, practices, and customs. We need to acknowledge the spiritual dimensions and the agency of ancestors as categories of relevance in debates, struggles, contestations around heritage.
Therefore, recourse to the spiritual dimension and ancestral node, should be part of broader attempts that are increasingly challenging the institutionalised epistemic privilege of museums or heritage institutions, whose conception of disciplinary knowledge is usually seen as the sum total of ways of knowing . For current global heritage practices, this presents an opportunity for some sort of redemptive engagement - one which allows inclusive, participatory techniques of engaging with the community.
Therefore, from African to the world--African communities continue to remind us that “heritage practices should always follow people”.
References
Chirikure, S. 2020. Great Zimbabwe Reclaiming a ‘Confiscated’ Past. London/NY: Routledge.
Clarke. M. 2008. Mambo Hills: Historical and Religious Significance. Amabooks, Bulawayo,
Fontein, J. 2006. The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage. Harare: Weaver Press.
ICCROM, 2015. People-Centred Approaches to the Conservation of Cultural Heritage: Living Heritage. Rome: ICCROM.
Mataga, J. 2024. Heritage pasts and their decolonial futures: ancestral tropes, continuity and change in Southern Africa, in Bozoğlu, G., G. Campbell, L. Smith and C. Whitehead (eds). 118-136. Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics. New York: Routledge
Mataga, J. 2023. COVID-19 and heritage in Southern Africa: precariousness, resilience and heritage futures. In N. Shepherd (ed), Resilient Heritage: Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times, New York: Routledge.
Ndoro, W. 2005. The Preservation of Great Zimbabwe: Your Monuments, Our Shrine. Rome: ICCROM.
Wijesuriya, G. 2017. “Towards the De-Secularisation of Heritage.” Built Heritage 2:1–15.
ICCROM
Author:
Jesmael Mataga is an Associate Professor and the inaugural Head of Humanities at Sol Plaatje University, in Kimberley. He previously worked as a Curator with the National Museums and Monuments in Zimbabwe (NMMZ) and taught at the National University of Lesotho. His research, situated in the emerging focus on critical and decolonial heritage, explores the role and place of communities in museums and heritage preservation. The work aims to contribute to new approaches to museum and heritage management practices that address the critical challenges of our time, such as poverty, inequality, conflict, decolonisation, migration and social justice. His recent publications include Independent Museums and Culture Centres in Colonial and Postcolonial Zimbabwe: Non-State Players, Local Communities and Self-Representation (Routledge)and Museums as Agents for Social Change: Decolonisation at the Mutare Museum (Routledge). He has also recently contributed to the Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics (2024), as well as Rethinking Heritage in Precarious Times (Routledge 2023).