ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I draw from recent writing on heritage in Africa to reflect on historical and inherited forms of precariousness. I consider how these have fostered resilience based on long-held, local community conceptions and ideas about heritage. Arguably, African heritages have always been in a state of precariousness owing to the effects of socio-political instabilities but more so due to marginalisation, dispossession, and devaluation triggered by universalised conceptions and post-colonial heritage governmentalities. Notwithstanding these inherited forms of precariousness, local conceptions of heritage have remained resilient, surfacing in unofficial and (un)institutionalised spaces, challenging their marginalisation. The COVID-19 global pandemic has orchestrated unprecedented instability, exposing limitations to how heritage has been approached, studied, understood, protected, and used. Due to the restrictions, normative heritage practices have been disrupted and at best suspended, forcing us to (re)think the future of heritage in Africa and globally–its meanings, values, practices, and discourses. Could the possibilities of a post-COVID-19 recovery lie in us changing the ways we ‘see’ heritage and fostering modes of engagement that prioritise the local (rather than the universalised and global)?
