Systemic erosion of oral knowledge: UNESCO urges Ghana to document intangible heritage amid global extractivist pressures
Original framing: “Publish oral traditions to preserve them - UNESCO to Ghana on World Book & Copyright Day” — bing news
Colonial regimes systematically dismantled oral knowledge systems to replace them with written, state-sanctioned histories, as in the 19th-century British suppression of Akan oral chronicles. Postcolonial Ghana’s education system, modeled on British structures, sidelined indigenous languages and oral pedagogies, creating a 200-year legacy of epistemic violence. The 1972 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Heritage, while progressive, still frames intangible heritage as 'endangered'—a narrative echoing 19th-century 'primitive' tropes.
The UNESCO directive reveals a paradox at the heart of global heritage governance: it seeks to 'preserve' oral traditions while embedding them in a legal and economic framework that has historically erased them.
Ghana’s postcolonial state, complicit in this erasure through its education system and copyright laws, now faces a choice between perpetuating epistemic extractivism or embracing decolonial models like *kaitiakitanga* and *kaupapa Māori*. The solution pathways—community-led archives, hybrid oral-digital systems, curriculum sovereignty, and legal pluriversality—offer a blueprint for reversing this legacy. Yet the trickster’s shadow lingers: as long as 'preservation' is framed as documentation for global consumption, the living essence of these traditions will remain out of reach. The true test will be whether Ghana’s leaders, from the *Asantehene* to the *President*, are willing to cede epistemic authority to those who have safeguarded this knowledge for centuries.