Transmodern heritage as a space for imagining pluriversal relations—Insights from the African “periphery”

Abstract

The N'zima village in Grand-Bassam and the Abbashawel area in Asmara were intrinsically connected to the “modern” colonial capitals of present-day Côte d'Ivoire and Eritrea, respectively, on the verges of which they functioned. However, structurally, organizationally and ontologically, they differed profoundly from their French- and Italian-planned “neighbors,” together with which they are today inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Interpreted as antithetical counterparts, products of African encounters with modernity, the two urban entities within Grand-Bassam and Asmara—European and African—tend to be described as interdependent, representing two sides of the same coin, neither of which could have existed without the other. This paper interrogates the said interpretation based on the center-periphery dynamic created by the politics of modernity, and proposes to use instead the decolonial pluriversal perspective and the concept of transmodernity to understand the experiences of being of the colonized African populations of Grand-Bassam and Asmara outside of Western onto-epistemologies. It points to the N'zima village and Abbashawel as the areas that enable visualizing reality that contests the binaries created by Western modernity in seeking pluralistic politics.