THE THOUGHTFUL MUSEUM Remembering and Disremembering in Africa (original) (raw)
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Introduction to Special Issue: Memory and the Formation of Political Identities in West Africa
Africa Today, 2006
This collection of essays centers on the relationship between memory work and political processes in several West African nations: Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Guinea-Conakry, and Mali. 1 The authors analyze from different angles what Hagberg (this volume) aptly calls "politicized memory," that is, selective recollections of the past that reflect politically informed agendas for the present. State-promoted memorialization of the past, both colonial and postcolonial, has long been recognized as a powerful strategy of state affirmation and legitimization. In addition, scholars have become increasingly aware that remembrance and memorialization represent arenas for the confrontation of a variety of social and political forces, such as the state, the political opposition, and minority groups (Comaroff 2005; Eyoh 1998; Mbembe 1986; Werbner 1998). Memory and its symbolic expressions (both tangible and intangible) come to reflect power claims as well as critiques of power. The study of memory challenges positivist understandings of history and ethnography-scholarly projects informed by the search for objective historical truths and pristine cultural traditions (Bellagamba, this volume). What aspects of the past will be remembered or forgotten, how, and by whom reflect agendas and orientations in the present (see Bellagamba and Goerg, this volume). Memory is not a static entity, but a process, one in which preservation and change, if in differing degrees, are mutually implicated (Clifford 2004). Memory articulations 2 intimately reflect negotiations among local, national, and international actors and their often diverging agendas (ibid.). For instance, Bellagamba shows how, in The Gambia, decisions about what to preserve, document, and exhibit depended upon the cultural agenda of the government, preservation policies promoted by international organizations (such as UNESCO), and scholarly traditions. Similarly, Arnoldi focuses on the hybrid process of public memory formation in postcolonial Mali: she details how institutions such as art festivals and museums, now perceived and portrayed as authentic Malian artistic traditions, are complex historical formations, which emerged during the colonial period. Though these cultural institutions are of foreign origin, they have been reappropriated in light of local traditions, and have become intrinsic parts of the national patrimony.
History and Memory in an African Context: A Case Study of Robben Island
Area Studies in the Global Age: Community, Place, Identity, 2016
W e all engage in memory work, but history-that is, our understandings and interpretations of it-plays a central role in framing acts of remembering. My interest in Africa's past has led me to consider the tension between history and memory on the African continent and in the Diaspora. History and memory both matter for identities and communities. Many scholars have come to view history as a form of social memory, rather than an unbiased narrative or story. 1 They acknowledge that collective memory, in turn, is a form of history, for how people remember helps us to make sense of our past, ground us in the present, and prepare us for the future. 2 Indeed, the ways in which we remember-and forget-shape and shift our interpretations of history, of change over time, of disruption and of continuity. 3 History is representation, and cultural memories are deployed to benefit certain groups over others. "Traditions" turn into honored cultural institutions. The state shapes the identity of the national community by producing historical narratives. Yet as the identity of the South African nation has changed so dramatically since the 1990s, so has the notion of community. Groups once fairly rigid under the segregated society of South African apartheid now cross boundaries and challenge old orders. Not everything has changed, however, as history and memory demonstrate in this African context. National myths emerge from a blend of history and memory, fact and fiction. These myths are often quite inauthentic, but they become authentic and highly symbolic, often appearing to be "natural. " The state promotes a collective memory and attempts to control this very public memory despite its ambiguous nature. 4 Yet often there are competing narratives that manage to slowly erode national myths over the long term or swiftly override them in a flash during political and economic transitions. Moments of transformation, such as the heady time surrounding South Africa's attainment of full independence in 1994, provide evidence with which to examine how disclosure and silence (public and private) work to shape social representations of history.
2011. 'Truth be Told': Some problems with historical revisionism in Kenya
African Studies. To cite this article: Lotte Hughes (2011): ‘Truth be Told’: Some Problems with Historical Revisionism in Kenya, African Studies, 70:2, 182-201 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2011.594626
Historical revisionism is equally appealing to state and non-state actors during periods of intense socio-political change, especially following civil conflict, when the need for unification is paramount. This applies to Kenya as it struggles to come to terms with the post-electoral crisis of 2007/08. The need to redress state-orchestrated amnesia about Mau Mau and the struggle for independence is also important; encouraged by first president Jomo Kenyatta, ostensibly in the interests of national unity, the trend was continued by his successor. Since Mau Mau was unbanned in 2003, and a lawsuit was brought by veterans with the support of a human rights group against the British government in 2009, there has been an upsurge in public memorialisation and debate about the liberation movement in Kenya. This has been accompanied by increasing calls for ‘true’ history to be written.1 Veterans have persuaded the state to support a project on rewriting Kenya history, which links to efforts to commemorate heroes and broaden official definitions of heroism to include a wide range of ethnic communities and rebel leaders from different periods of anti-colonial resistance. These themes are reflected in two new history exhibitions developed by National Museums of Kenya (NMK), and in the local media, which has done more to popularise these histories and commemorative initiatives than any scholarly texts. This article draws on research interviews and the literature on resistance, social memory and patriotic nationalism to problematise and analyse these developments, within the context of constitutional change.
Museums in Kenya: Spaces for Selecting, Ordering and Erasing Memories of Identity and Nationhood
African Studies, 2011
This article discusses representations of 'nationhood' at National Museums of Kenya (NMK) and community peace museums (CPMs). The representations range from a virtual absence of exhibitions on nationhood to exhibitions of cultural objects associated with specific ethnic groups and commemoration of local and/or national heroes. The representations at NMK appear to be informed by the expressed and/or assumed wishes of the country's political leadership. As such, the social memory they evoke has suffered episodic interruptions through time. On the other hand, representations at CPMs are, to a large extent, informed by influential individuals or small sections of the community and tend to concentrate on the ethnic group within which they are located, thus articulating local as opposed to national issues. This situation contributes to contestations of 'nationhood' in Kenya, a phenomenon that has come to the fore with every general election since the re-introduction of multi-party politics 20 years ago and, in particular, with the 2007/08 post-election violence.
Politics of Remembering and Forgetting: The Struggle over Colonial Monuments in Mali
Africa Today, 2006
This paper focuses on the politics of remembering and forgetting in Mali from 1960 to 2002. It argues that in contrast to the highly selective remembering promoted by Mali's first two regimes (1960-1991), the democratic state has promoted the revaluation of and reconciliation with the past, and in particular with colonization. The analysis reconstructs how Mali's political leaders have attempted to present a more heterogeneous and inclusive account of the roots of the Malian state, where modernity and tradition are seen as mutually implicated. The paper details instances of popular resistance to the state memorialization of the past in which diverse sectors of the population struggle for a greater involvement, not only in the management of their cultural patrimony, but also in national and regional politics.
Reconsidering Heritage and Memory
Studies of memory in Africa have consistently stressed the contested nature of such practices as commemoration, remembrance, and forgetting. State ritual and personal and group recollections are inevitably situated in a politicized 0 0 9 1 0 0 9 2 context. Richard Werbner speaks of a memory crisis : in postcolonial Africa memory is full of contradictions between the grandiosity of state ceremonialism and popular memory (cf Mbembe 1992; Werbner 1998a). The literature suggests that popular memory is genuine, whereas state ceremony and monuments are mere spectacles of the State. It is undeniable that, as a consequence of colonialism and the impact of European derived models of nationalism, the State in Africa has a tendency to monumentalize itself. Such a policy is reinforced by UNESCO and other agencies that promote heritage technologies for the production of official pasts and futures. However, in this volume we are interested in how memory attaches itself to heritage in often unexpected ways. In this context, we discover a broader principle that modern heritage and memory share a common origin in conflict and loss. Monuments, museums, and memorials are inseparable from the powerful modern moods of nostalgia and longing for authenticity as well as escalating desires for roots and origins. Thus we ask what kind of memorialising tactics and strategies attach themselves to the technologies of heritage. Which memory politics emerge in the context of such more formal institutions and which memories remain hidden and, when deliberately denied, even repressed? The aim of this volume is to examine how heritage technologies are appropriated for the recognition of past suffering and the creation of futures of hope. 13
To take on a tradition, then, and what is most powerful and gripping within it, one must affirm and contest not only the arguments and claims of tradition but traditional ways of making arguments and claims, of claiming authority, producing evidence, and gaining conviction, traditional modes of receiving and reading the tradition. Hence it is necessary not only to take a critical stance toward the tradition but to adopt a performative strategy with regard to it. Whereas Derrida's texts thus analyse traditional philosophical issues and concepts in order to reveal something untraditional within them, they also perform traditional critical gestures in order to invent other, unprecedented gestures from within them. (Naas 2003: xix-xx) Derrida's strategy of 'taking on a tradition' has obvious implications for the domain of cultural heritage and cultural memory 1 . Written as a 'thought piece', this first chapter deploys this strategy to provide a broad critical rehearsal of the conceptual, intellectual, and moral-ethical issues at stake in selected 'performative moments' of memory-work and the attendant construction of heritage imaginaries. The critical contribution of this chapter is to narrate the historical 'Westernisation' of heritage memory and the challenges made to this discourse as it is confronted by an 'othering' identified as an 'Africanist turn'. Thus my objective in this paper is to use Derrida's critical framework in order to return to selected 'performative moments' within the 'tradition' of African heritage, and, in a further connectivity with Derrida -who, as a Sephardic Jew