Colonial legacies distort African heritage governance: systemic decolonisation through community-led, epistemic pluralism
Original framing: “Community engagement, heritage decolonisation and governance in Africa” — bing news
Women, youth, and rural custodians are systematically excluded from heritage governance, despite bearing the labor of preservation (e.g., griots in West Africa, *izinyanga* in Southern Africa). Disabled and queer communities’ heritage (e.g., *mashoga* traditions in Swahili coast) is pathologized or erased. Global funding flows prioritize 'marketable' heritage (e.g., Egypt’s pyramids) over Indigenous sacred sites, reinforcing colonial hierarchies of value.
The headline’s focus on 'community engagement' masks a deeper crisis: colonial epistemic violence persists in heritage governance through centralized institutions, Western legal frameworks, and funding regimes that treat Indigenous knowledge as folklore rather than science.
This is not accidental but structural—UNESCO’s 1970 Convention, global museum networks, and IMF tourism policies all reproduce the same power dynamics, where 'decolonisation' becomes a buzzword for neoliberal co-optation. Yet African Indigenous systems (e.g., Ubuntu, *Sankofa*) offer living alternatives, and global parallels (Māori *taonga*, Native American NAGPRA) prove restitution is possible when marginalised voices lead. The path forward requires dismantling epistemic hierarchies—not just adding 'community' to governance—but reimagining heritage as a relational, land-based, and reparative process. Actors like the *African Heritage Foundation* and scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o show how this can be done, but only if the trickster’s disruption (Hermes/Anansi) exposes the absurdity of performative decolonisation.