Section 1 Cultural Heritage

**3**

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

**1. Introduction**

Significance in African Heritage

Heritage professionals are at all times called upon to make significant judgments about heritage places/objects. There is a supposition therefore that heritage places or objects have intrinsic values that need to be discovered and assigned. This paper, using various examples from Africa, however, argues that values are not intrinsic to heritage but are a construct of heritage professionals/community, and therefore, a heritage place/object can have various values depending on who is making the judgment. It therefore follows that if values vary according to who is assigning them, then the significant/insignificant of a heritage place and object will also vary from one person/ community to another. The paper concludes by arguing that significant/insignificant judgments are hegemonic constructions between contending forces, and therefore, it is

*Herman Ogoti Kiriama and Edith Nyangara Onkoba*

difficult to have a universally accepted significant or insignificant judgment.

Cultural Heritage is an expression of the ways of living developed by a community and passed on from generation to generation [1]. It is now widely acknowledged that heritage is not only manifested through tangible forms such as artefacts, buildings or landscapes but also through intangible forms such as voices, values, traditions and oral history [2, 3]. Cultural heritage and especially its intangible dimensions act as a means of preserving the links between the past and the present and also allows the transmission of its different shades and colours to future generations [4–6]. This notion has led to the conservation etic which argues that for heritage to be available to the future generations, it must be managed [7]. For this management to happen, it is assumed that a community has to have some values or significance for the heritage and this value is determined by an assessment that is governed by a stringent criterion. This premise has led to an entrenchment of practices, mostly Eurocentric, of valuing heritage in the world [8, 9]. Consequently, a number of scholars and institutions, such as Mason [10], Australia ICOMOs [11] and English Heritage [12], just to name a few, have provided various definitions of heritage value typologies. According to Mason [10], heritage values refer to the "positive characteristics or qualities perceived in cultural objects or sites" by a certain community; these values are entrenched by both tangible and intangible elements of the heritage. Mason goes on to propose a typology of heritage as a way of establishing a common ground for expressing heritage values by all concerned and in order to avoid a "black box" scenario where values are "collapsed into an aggregated statement of significance" which makes it difficult to conserve divergent values ([10], 8–10). Mason further argues that the usefulness of his proposed typology is in the fact that it includes various values, therefore making the community know that their values are recognised.

**Keywords:** heritage, significance, ancestors, insignificant
