Swahilipot and Modern heritage of Africa workshop 8th July 2021
The Modern Heritage of Africa (MoHoA) Workshop aimed at enhancing knowledge and awareness of the concept of modern heritage among the youth. The African World Heritage Fund (AWHF) has identified modern heritage as one of the marginalized heritage categories that urgently need identification and documentation if it is to be more fairly represented on the World Heritage List. This is in line with the Global Strategy for a credible balanced and representative World Heritage List as adopted by the World Heritage Committee in 1994. Following on this narrative, the workshop will bring together youth to a discourse on their understanding of Modern Heritage of Africa while using the Kenyan Swahili Coast as a model site. The focus of the workshop will be geared towards those of Modern Heritage of Africa (MoHoA) particularly in employing a transdisciplinary approach to generate circular knowledge and undertake critical research on the definition, identification and sustainable conservation of Africa’s modern heritage. The youth were drawn from a diverse field of the creatives including performing arts, architecture, fashion, design, and videography among others. The youth will be taken through the concept, meaning and identification of Modern Heritage of Africa through a series of lectures (2-3) and using each of their strengths in the creatives, they will be required to showcase their understanding of the same. For example, a musician could create a song describing their understanding and meaning of Modern Heritage using an example of the same within the Kenyan Coast. Similarly, a visual artist could create a painting/drawing of the same.
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Swahilipot MoHoA Workshop 8th July 2021
Working Session: 3 May 2021. Conceptualisation of Modern Heritage of Africa: Towards a Cape Town Document
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Expert Meeting Session: 26 April 2021. Two keynote presentations. Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty & Professor Achille Mbembe
Introduction to first keynote speaker, Achille Mbembe
Achille Mbembe needs no introduction to us. Based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand, he is one of the foremost thinkers on the question of postcoloniality and contemporary politics on the African continent. Mbembe was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York (1988-1991), a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. (1991-1992), Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania (1992-1996), Executive Secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, Senegal (1996-2000). He was also a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (2001), at Yale University (2003), at the University of California at Irvine (2004-2005), at Duke University (2006-2011) and at Harvard University (2012). He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Paris VIII (France) and Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He has also held the Albert the Great Chair at the University of Koln (2019) and was an Honorary Professor at the Jakob Fugger-Zentrum, University of Augsburg (Germany). He has been awarded numerous awards including the 2015 Geswichter Scholl-Preis, the 2018 Gerda Henkel Award and the 2018 Ernst Bloch Award.
He seminal books include On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001), Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2016), Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019) and Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2020). His address to this workshop on modern heritage of Africa problematises the idea of modernity in Africa, particularly its Eurocentric and colonial roots. In his address he poses the question of whether heritage in Africa can be understood without reference to its Eurocentric modern origins, and if so what kind of concept of heritage will that entail for futures yet to come on the African continent that is intimately linked to the rest of the world.
Click link below for Keynote presentation:
Keynote presentation by Professor Achille Mbembe
Introduction to 2nd keynote Speaker, Dipesh Chakrabathy
Dipesh Chakrabarty is currently the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the Faculty Director, University of Chicago Center in Delhi, a faculty fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, an associate of the Department of English, and by courtesy, a faculty member in the Law School.
His distinguished career includes founding member of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, consulting editor of Critical Inquiry and founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. He has made profound contributions to the intersections between history and postcolonial theory and has published widely, including many seminal books: Rethinking Working Class History (1989), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (2002); The Crises of Civilization: Exploring on Global and Planetary Histories (2018), And, we congratulate him on the very recently published, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021)
Professor Chakrabathy placed the question of heritage as memory in its multiple manifestations including the interpellation of societal and physical environmental changes over millennia squarely in the current climate crisis. Heritage may well be an important tool to think of our planetary future.
Click link below for Keynote presentation:
keynote presentation by Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty
Expert Meeting: African conceptions of modernity
26 April 2021 & 4th May 2021
Click link below to access the agenda for the meeting:
Expert Meeting: African conceptions of modernity
Modern Heritage of Africa
Preliminary and brainstorming session
20 & 27 August 2020
click on link below to access a report of the meeting:
Premilinary and Brainstorming session summary report