Decolonizing Heritage: Time to Repair in Senegal by Ferdinand de Jong

Abstract

The idea of decolonization has come to the fore in recent years’ scholarship on cultural heritage. Not that the concept is a new one: but with Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall protests roiling the (haltingly) postcolonial world, it is entirely expected that heritage studies publications on the topic would grow. Not, either, that heritage scholars who are interested in the question of the past in the present had utterly failed to consider decolonization, but like pop culture, academia has its trends. The problem, for researchers, is often the mismatch between the speed with which trends flow and ebb, and the relentlessly glacial pace of funding applications, fieldwork, and publication. Some scholars have answered this eternal, and eternally shifting, need for applicability with tendentious conclusions about how their work responds to this decolonial focus. Others, more fortunate, have been able to draw upon years of preexisting research that legitimately rises to meet the moment. Among the latter is Ferdinand de Jong's new book on Senegalese cultural heritage and imaginings of the utopian future, Decolonizing Heritage: Time to Repair in Senegal.The discussion of Eurocentrism and colonial dynamics in heritage practice (and scholarship) has existed in the discipline of heritage studies since before this most recent surge in interest. Works on heritage by African scholars and scholars of Africa have been at the forefront of this conversation: it is obviously crucial to discuss colonialism and its legacies, along with prospects for countering them, when considering a continent whose present-day political arrangements and position in modern racial-capitalist orders have been drastically shaped by colonial forces. Such factors have naturally impacted heritage practice, too, from destroying traditional methods of management to alienating communities from their own heritage. Today, governments, civil society actors, and communities across Africa are reclaiming such heritage in the pursuit of goals like cultural revitalization. This project requires reckoning with the impacts of colonialism past and present, which includes not only how colonial administrations intervened in African heritage practices, but also how conditions of heritage-making today are shaped by both histories and ongoing dynamics of global colonialism. Scholarship has included both a consideration of colonialism and its impacts and decolonizing responses—such as reanimating locally grounded ways of thinking about heritage, in which contributions by African archaeologists and heritage scholars such as Shadreck Chirikure (2021) and Ashton Sinamai (2021) are vitally important. Along with excavating the past, these efforts are interested in developing new orientations toward the present and the future.Decolonizing Heritage considers the future not merely as a temporal concern for heritage practice, but also as an object of historical interest. What visions of the future did the past develop, and how might those inform heritage practices today—and especially the outlook for its decolonization? Ferdinand de Jong is well positioned to consider these questions. His work on Senegalese heritage dates back multiple decades, as does his concern with several of the themes of this book; his interest in decolonization is no retroactive fashioning to fit the Zeitgeist. His earlier coedited volume Reclaiming Heritage: Alternative Imaginaries of Heritage in West Africa (2007) raised ideas about the reworking and reappropriation of complex heritages which recur in Decolonizing Heritage. Having published another book on Senegal (2007) and numerous articles, de Jong is a preeminent scholar of the country's heritage in English—although the book curiously fails to clearly contextualize its current argument in this long history of engagement. The Acknowledgements section offers the only hints as to when the fieldwork for this book was carried out (evidently there was at least one long period dating to 2012-2013), although it seems, given the occasional dates of happenings analyzed in the text, that the book incorporates many years of work both well before and well after this period. It remains vague, too, regarding the methods de Jong pursued his research questions. Some sort of participant observation in tours, festivals, and site visits is readily apparent, as is concern with archives and public and popular media, and conversations, too (“interviews”? Difficult to say), all of which evidently adds up to longterm ethnographic engagement. Still, transparency here would only have benefited the book.However, questions about methodology aside, what de Jong has produced from this hazy background is a dense, discursive, thought-provoking contribution to the discussion of heritage decolonization. What does such a term even mean? While Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012) remind us that decolonization is “not a metaphor,” the word has, by now, become large, diffuse—and unclear, in the sense that practical routes toward decolonization, its contexts, and perhaps even its ends are profoundly unsettled and contested. As an approach to this question, what emerges from de Jong's portrait of Senegalese heritage is an argument traced via its through-lines in an assemblage of approaches to the past, present, and future, ultimately ordered by the thematic considerations of reworking time, the pursuit of utopia, and the pan-African project of Négritude.De Jong raises, turns over, and picks apart a range of heritage elements: the UNESCO World Heritage “House of Slaves,” interpreted as a place of forced embarkation for enslaved West Africans snared in the transatlantic trade; a lantern festival called the Fanal; the memory of the signares, women whose existence was entangled with class, race, and the slave-trading economy in the French colony; Sufi pilgrimage and prayer; memorials to the tirailleur soldiers; two schools for the education of the Senegalese elite, one in ruins and the other never opened; the Museum of Black Civilizations, Senegal's answer to Eurocentric dismissals of African museum capacity; and any number of other practices and actors, large and small, in colonial and postcolonial heritage in Senegal. These case studies are well worth the reader's time for their deep investigation of heritage practices, grounded in history and benefiting from an incisive eye for political currents, even if the chapters can on occasion threaten to collapse beneath the weight of their details. Through this episodic approach to Senegalese heritage practice, de Jong illustrates a project concerned with reclaiming, remaking, reappropriating, and reworking heritage in order to repair, or anyway come to terms with, the fraught legacy of colonialism, as well as ideas about a nonnational, pan-African solidarity. But this is not simply a backward-looking project, the way “coming to terms” might imply. Instead, de Jong aims to contribute to a multitemporal investigation which targets that trickiest of all temporalities: the future.De Jong finds a unifying framework for such an effort in Négritude, a literary and philosophical approach to Blackness and the values (and valuing) of Black civilizations in Africa and the diaspora. Négritude was developed by the towering trio of Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and—the Senegalese connection—future president of independent Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor. While I had encountered the movement primarily as a onetime student of Francophone literature, de Jong highlights Négritude's political valences. He notes how the project of Négritude concerned questions of sovereignty in the face of colonialism and, a thread drawn throughout the book, pursuits of pan-African solidarity oriented toward constructing an alternative future.To what extent could Senghor's (and Damas's, and Césaire's) ideas really be said to drive heritage practices in the twenty-first century? Here, de Jong's vagueness about certain key elements presents a problem: for a full clarification of Négritude, he refers readers in a footnote to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Very well!—I went there, and found in it an extremely useful, in-depth treatment of the concept and its development that would have been equally useful if actually contained in the book. De Jong ultimately argues for the presence of Négritude's legacy in utopian imaginations in Senegalese heritage (p. 31), rather than for a clear citation of Senghor himself in the heritage sector (with the exception of Senghor's involvement in interpretation at the House of Slaves). Fair enough. One of the advantages of using Négritude as an interpretative device in Decolonizing Heritage is that doing so helps de Jong to skirt some of the problems inherent in being a European scholar of Africa: the decolonial ideas and their manifestations here are homegrown, by and for Africans and the worldwide Black diaspora.De Jong aims to excavate the “untimely utopias” of Négritude's project as they manifest in heritage: the “remembrance and forgetting of alternative pasts … [and] various unrealized futures” that linger in Senegal's heritage-making (p. 17). He argues that this is not simply an unpacking of Senegalese heritage practices, but rather that imagining a decolonized future in the face of various postcolonial failures requires revisiting the ways the past itself imagined alternative futures—such as through Négritude and pan-Africanism. In this, de Jong identifies an “Afro-nostalgia” which “emerged as a critique of the colonial project and was conceived as a work of repair” (p. 32).Repair is a key word here. What de Jong identifies in Senegalese heritage practice is not just a confrontation with the past, as a solely deconstructive effort is inadequate to the project of decolonization. There must also be a construction: the creation of something new, a repaired world with which to be getting on. Contemporary Senegalese heritage practices, de Jong argues, in their reappropriation of colonial heritage and their consideration of potential futures as imagined in both the past and the present, aim at an essential aspect of decolonization: the assertion of agency. It is not in simple rejection of colonial heritage, but in reworking it—in reconsidering heritage, reframing it, reinterpreting it—that de Jong locates this agency. This form of heritage-making in Senegal, he argues, allows “postcolonial subjects … to reclaim their subjectivity” (p. 32). “Ultimately,” he continues, it is “a technique for the decolonization of time, repair of trauma, and reclamation of the self.”These are very big claims for the relatively small heritage practices he recounts: he considers historic reenactors playing Signare traders in the Fanal festival, or how, through the annual Prayer of Two Rakhas commemoration, Murid religious adherents conceive of the role of their leader in the construction of the Senegalese nation. Still, if one goes along for the ride, de Jong's book is delightfully utopian, and not only in its willingness to take seriously the past's imaginations of a better future. Faced with so many examples of decolonial failures—I come to this review having recently read Bénédicte Savoy's Africa's Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat (2022)—it is a relief to encounter a project which, for all of its difficult entanglements, achieves some construction along with all of its deconstruction. On what is the decolonized future to be built? Surely it cannot be only on facing the wounds of the colonial past and analyzing them, but also, crucially, on an active attempt at repair that seizes upon alternative imaginaries of the world to be made. “Sites of memory,” de Jong says, “still uphold a promise of decolonization through their remembrance of alternative futures” (p. 30). Perhaps this is enough to ask for as we rake through the ashes of history.