The jagged past

Abstract

There is a special melancholy when African heritage is lost, especially on a scale of the Jagger Reading Room at the University of Cape Town. African heritage has always been fragile – liable to condescension, extraction, and elimination by European powers keen to “devalue the colonial past,” as Frantz Fanon put it in “On National Culture.” Devaluation of tradition robs people of their pride, purpose, and sense of uniqueness, and turns them in the direction of becoming inert subjects. It eliminates their sense of difference from the colonizer, of not belonging to him. Heritage stolen from one group is heritage gained by another. What Africa lost became Europe’s property. Africa lost a past, while Europe gained a patrimony, stashed in its museums and overflowing its libraries, which, by a vast irony, then served to shore up its sense of power and authority over the very cultures from which the goods were plundered. African objects, now French or English, served as part of the bulwark of heritage by which Europe claimed its superiority over native populations. African objects became instruments for the belittling of Africa, thanks to their second lives as European heritage. There is thus a special demand for the cultivation of archives in African museums and universities, libraries, and national institutions. The past is wanted back, so that the modern nation state may empower itself with heritage. An emergent nation requires pride in its past, and a sense (mythic or not) that it has emerged from that past. Whatever many problems Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance had – including its egregious misuse in justifying a grotesque HIV/ AIDS policy – it was responding to an inner requirement of the nation state. That requirement mandates that it claim longevity and identity partly through recourse to its deep past, relevantly re-scripted for the present. This has been the formula of the nation state since its inauguration, thanks to the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War that had wracked Europe, leaving every capital vulnerable to attack by every other, and populations – Catholic v. Protestant – at violent odds across fragile borders. Thanks to those treaties, the newly arising nation state could no longer define itself on transnational religious authority, so it had to find other ways to unite its populations. Thus, the modern European form of heritage was created – and with it, the birth of the museum in the eighteenth century.