African Heritage Challenges

Communities and Sustainable Development

Britt Baillie, Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Britt Baillie, Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Britt Baillie, Marie Louise Stig Sørensen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9789811543661
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The richness of Africa's heritage at times stands in stark contrast to the economic, health, political and societal challenges faced. Development is essential but in what forms? For whom? Following whose agendas? At what costs? This book explores how heritage can promote, secure, or undermine sustainable development with special focus on sub-Saharan Africa, and in turn, how this affects conceptions of heritage. The chapters in this volume identify shared challenges, good practices and failures, and use specific case studies to provide detailed insights into varied forms of heritage and heritage defining processes on the continent. By critically analysing the often romanticised discourses of 'heritage', 'community engagement', and 'sustainable development' the volume suggests ways of harnessing aspects of heritage to tackle some of the socio-economic and political pressures facing heritage practices on the continent, including the legacies of colonialism.

African States and the Transnational Development Agenda

© The Author(s) 2021

B. Baillie, M. L. S. Sørensen (eds.)African Heritage ChallengesGlobalization, Urbanization and Development in Africa https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4366-1_9

Begin Abstract

The Culture Bank in West Africa: Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development

Mathilde Leloup¹

(1)

Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR)/Associated to the Center for International Studies (CERI), University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Mathilde Leloup

Email: [email protected]

The paper relies on data collected through observation and interviews for my Master’s thesis which was later published as a book. See Les Banques Culturelles, Penser la redéfinition du développement par l’Art (Leloup 2016).

End Abstract

A Socio-History of Culture Banks in West Africa

The Culture Bank model, created in 1997 in a small Malian village called Fombori (in the Douentza administrative district), is composed of three structures: a museum which collects cultural heritage artifacts belonging to inhabitants of the related village, a micro-credit bank which provides grants to the owners of these artifacts, and a training center which trains the beneficiaries of the micro-credit grants on the development of ‘income-generating activities.’ This model sought to create interdependence between local development and cultural heritage protection. It intended to protect cultural heritage from illicit trafficking, especially in rural areas—through the creation of a museum, which would exhibit cultural artifacts and ‘lend’ them to their owners for rituals. It also aimed at initiating a process of sustainable and local development—through micro-credit grants given in exchange for these items. The model intended to benefit the whole community—through the training center. Originally, this model was the result of the failure of two former models: a women’s cooperative and a community museum, coupled with a micro-credit bank. In 1993, Aissata Ongoiba, an inhabitant of Fombori, attended a craft fair in a neighboring village and decided to duplicate this model in her own village to attract tourists. Shortly after this first experience, a second group of women from Fombori tried to reproduce the idea. In the midst of these rival groups, members of the Peacecorps and the NGO Gestion Aménagement du Territoire created a community museum with a craft store. In 1996, this museum went bankrupt as the Fombori inhabitants were reluctant to deposit their artifacts and only a trickle of tourists visited (Keita 2007: 118). Learning from this double failure, another Peacecorps member, Todd Crosby, sought to bridge the gap between the craft cooperative and the community museum models and the needs in Fombori. By introducing the idea of compensation, the initiator of the Culture Bank model took advantage of the failures of two former projects to better respond to local expectations (Deubel 2003: 31).

Recognized by the Development Marketplace of the World Bank in 2002 (World Bank 2002a) and funded by the discretionary fund of James Wolfensohn in 2003 (Jerry Dell former consultant WBI/CESI, personal communication, 18 April 2014), the Culture Bank model was labeled a success story in the ‘Fight against Poverty’ campaign of the 1990s. These two funds allowed the creation of two additional Culture Banks in Mali: one in Kola (Bougouni administrative district) and another in Degnekoro (Dioïla administrative district) in 2004 (Dell 2004). Thanks to the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the School of African Heritage (EPA) in Benin, the Culture Bank model has since been diffused from Mali to Koutammakou in Togo and Tanéka in Benin, to create a network of experts to further the ‘preventive conservation’ mission of ICCROM (the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property). The Culture Bank model is used today as an example of the articulation between culture and development in the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and between Cultural Heritage and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda (UNGA 2013) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

The diffusion of the Culture Banks model in West Africa

(Source Compiled by Mathilde Leloup. © FNSP—Sciences Po, Atelier de cartographie, 2018)

The aim of this chapter is to question the manner in which connections can be made between development—which refers to the future and to progress—and the protection of cultural heritage—which refers to the uses of the past in the present. This will be examined through an analysis of the Culture Banks in Togo and Benin. My goal is to query the articulation between local and international actors in the context of the ‘social multilateralism’ (Louis 2011: 17–18) that characterizes the development scene. According to Marieke Louis, ‘social multilateralism’ is situated on the common ground of two tendencies: the ‘new multilateralism’ of Robert Cox and the ‘complex multilateralism’ of Robert O’Brien. According to Cox, the aim of ‘new multilateralism’ is ‘to build up pressure from below towards a broadening of participation and a greater equalising of opportunities in multilateral processes’ (Cox 1997: xxi). O’Brien defines ‘complex multilateralism’ as a ‘broadening of the policy agenda to include more social issues’ (O’Brien et al. 2000: 210).

The concept of ‘development’ in the 1950s referred to the notion of countries of the global South economically ‘catching up’ to countries of the global North. Rostow for instance, in his book The Stages of Economic Growth in 1960, identified five stages common to the development of societies from a traditional agrarian model to a contemporary mass consumption model with a major stage of ‘take off’ in-between which entails growth in both investment and saving (Petiteville 2012: 115). More recently, the concept of ‘empowerment’ has entered into the development discourse (Sen 2000). This captures Amartya Sen’s holistic understanding of development, which shaped the contemporary notion of ‘human development.’ In the Human Development Report of 1990, ‘human development’ is defined as:

… a process of enlarging people’s choices. In principle, these choices can be infinite and change over time. But at all levels of development, the three essential ones are for people to lead a long and healthy life, to acquire knowledge and to have access to resources needed for a decent standard of living. If these essential choices are not available, many other opportunities remain inaccessible. (UNDP 1990: 10)

According to this notion, development must include human factors such as the improvement of living conditions as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI) and cannot be understood as being solely based on economic criteria. Emanating from the perspective of ‘capabilities’ as defined by Sen, this expansion of the definition of development has to be understood to increase the choices granted to development recipients regarding their way of life (ibid.). Sen distinguishes two kinds of capabilities:

Human development has two sides: the formation of human capabilities - such as improved health, knowledge and skills - and the use people make of their acquired capabilities - for leisure, productive purposes or being active in cultural, social and political affairs. If the scales of human development do not finely balance the two sides, considerable human frustration may result. (ibid.: 10)

This definition has subsequently been complemented by the ‘comprehensive development framework’ of Stiglitz, as a system encompassing the economic, political, and cultural spheres (Stiglitz 2002: 163–182). Meanwhile, the Brundtland Report launched the concept of ‘sustainable development’, defined as a ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (UNGA 1987). This concept initially represented an attempt to combine economic progress with the management of finite environmental resources. In all of these definitions, ‘development’ seems to refer to the change of societies, toward better well-being.

The term ‘culture’ is one of the most difficult words to define in the English language. It can encompass the conservation of cultural heritage and cultural industries in a narrow sense but also the way of life of a given population in a broader sense. In the case of the naming of the Culture Bank, the term ‘cultural heritage’ which is defined by Françoise Benhamou as all of the ‘heterogeneous tangible and intangible properties whose common values are aesthetic and historic’¹ (Benhamou 2012: 3–4, author’s translation) might have been more appropriate than ‘culture.’

Examining the Culture Bank Model

There has been very little scholarly research on Culture Banks to date because they are a recent initiative. The existing literature is biased because it has only been written by scholars who participated in the development of extant Culture Banks. In total, one Master’s thesis, three contributions to edited volumes, and a book exist on this subject. Deubel’s (2003) thesis was written about the Culture Bank of Fombori. Two of the chapters in edited volumes were penned by Aldiouma Yattara (2007) and Daouda Keita (2007), experts selected by the World Bank to spread the model of Culture Bank in Mali. The former explained the genesis of the first Culture Bank in Fombori and the support of the World Bank of this model and the latter evaluated the concrete impact of both the Kola and Degnekoro banks. A third chapter was written by Frederic Wherry and Todd Crosby (2011), the initiator of the first Culture Bank, who presented the theoretical basis of the Culture Bank model in order to distinguish his model from the general model of micro-credit banks as set out by Mohammed Yunus. The existing Culture Bank publications have stemmed from the disciplines of anthropology and museology, but have not addressed the phenomenon from an International Relations perspective. Therefore, I decided in 2014, to write my Master’s thesis on this topic in order to demonstrate how inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Heritage Challenges in Africa: Contestations and Expectations
• Managing Africa’s Anthropocene Environment
• Communities and the Quotidian
• African States and the Transnational Development Agenda
• Back Matter