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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: D19-03. To panel D19.

Title of paper:

Author:

Marie Huber (Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin).

Short abstract paper:
UNESCO supported museum building in African states after 1950. This paper focuses on the training and curatorial work in museums and conservation workshops, the knowledge production and the perspectives of African and European conservators in these projects.

Long abstract paper:
In the context of decolonisation and the new international order forming in the 1960s African political leaders had to reformulate the national identities they claimed to represent and African intellectuals acted as representatives of sovereign, independent nation-states and actualised the discourse of a particular African identity and intellectuality. Various projects emerged to rewrite African history as Africa's own history, and the re-appropriation and emancipation of national heritage-making formed a relevant issue in the process of decolonisation-having a national heritage meant having a national identity and belonging to the community of sovereign nation-states. UNESCO served most prominently as a framework to promote the importance of history and heritage as a strategy for empowerment and fostering the nascent national identities of the new member states in the era of decolonisation, in other words: providing development-aid for nation-building. Aside from the historiographical project of The General History of Africa, there is more to be told about the construction of national histories, and as a part of it, identifying cultural and natural heritage to augment national identity. Based on records from the UNESCO archive and the Ethiopian Antiquities Administration I will explain UNESCO's cultural and natural heritage politics in African countries during the 60s and 70s, and show the involvement of international experts, of creating heritage-institutions and heritage-bureaucracy in African states, modeled on Western concepts of 'heritage' and 'conservation' as universal principles.

UNESCO's role in promoting the identity discourses that underwrote the construction of national narratives in African countries, in this paper, will be analysed in light of its role as an institution that built-up and facilitated knowledge production, and the institutional and conceptual legacies of this knowledge production.

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