Since 2015, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, has made May 5 African World Heritage Day. If this spotlight on the continent aims to give greater visibility to a little-known heritage, it also reminds us that Africa remains very under-represented in the World Heritage list established since 1972, with only 148 sites registered out of 1 199 worldwide.
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At the head of the UNESCO World Heritage Center since 2021, Cameroonian Lazare Eloundou Assomo’s mission is to correct this imbalance. An architect by training and a keen connoisseur of heritage issues, he is the first African to hold the position.
UNESCO has made Africa a priority. What are the advances?
Lazare Eloundou Assomo In 2023, five new African sites were included in the Heritage list, including two for Rwanda, which had none: the Nyungwe National Park and the genocide memorial sites. This made it possible to show Africans that this is possible, to remove any doubt. Our objective now is to support the eleven countries which are not represented towards registration by 2027. This requires strengthening local expertise to enable them to identify cultural or natural places which are eligible for registration. In some cases, we start from scratch. But each registration is a celebration, a reason for national pride. Whatever the degree of advancement, there is momentum everywhere on the continent. Heritage takes its place in cultural policies.
Should we set a percentage to give Africa the place it deserves?
We are discussing it and a working group will submit conclusions at the end of May. For my part, I do not think that representativeness is a question of numbers, but we need means to support countries. Not just to prepare nomination files. We must then be able to support States to ensure the conservation of the sites. The means today are not sufficient.
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Has the heritage list not become an unbalanced competition between countries which have more or less means to register their sites and obtain this tourist label to the detriment of the values of sharing and diversity that it is supposed to promote?
This is the image we do not want to see. World Heritage is not a trophy competition. It is an ideal that serves to bring all countries together to protect the most important sites on the planet. Certainly, an inscription generates tourism because it signals to the world an extraordinary place, but this is neither the first nor the only purpose of the Heritage list.
How would you define the contribution, the singularity of African heritage sites?
We must not look at African heritage through the prism of Western societies. For example, the glorification of creative genius cannot operate here all the time because, often, the disappearance of physical materials means that it no longer exists. We must therefore accept that African heritage is something that is renewed like, for example, earthen architecture, which is destroyed and reused in the same places. African heritage is not necessarily monumental. What matters is the meaning of the place, its social use, its symbolic force from the point of view of beliefs and traditions. Sacred forests or granary villages, for example, are part of this heritage.
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Most often due to conflicts, 40% of sites in danger are African. You set out to ” save “ half by 2029. Is this realistic when we know that some, like in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), have been considered in danger for thirty years?
We are working on it. The tombs of the kings of Buganda in Uganda which were destroyed by fire were removed from the Heritage in Danger list in 2023 after ten years of restoration work. We are hopeful that the Niokolo-Koba park in Senegal will take the same path. Even if the security conditions remain difficult, as in Mali, we continue to support the conservationists of the sites to protect, for example, the mausoleums of Timbuktu or the ancient city of Djenné.
You are a fervent supporter of the restitution of African heritage, are you not frustrated by the slowness of decisions?
It’s not happening fast enough. There is legitimacy for African countries to request the return of these cultural objects. Nobody disputes that. Our role is to help mediate between countries so that they find a satisfactory solution. But the movement is underway and we are seeing agreements that we could not have imagined just a few years ago.
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