Community-oriented approaches to heritage management in Zimbabwe & South Africa

Date: Wednesday 14 December 2022

Time: 19:30-21:00 CET

Speakers: Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya & Gcobani Sipoyo 

ONLINE VIA ZOOM: To register please send an email to lezingen@icomos.nl 

Dear heritage colleagues and friends,

 

We kindly invite you to the upcoming ICOMOS Netherlands lecture evening on Wednesday 14 December about ‘Community-oriented approaches to heritage management in Zimbabwe & South Africa’. Involving and working with communities has become an important element in the preservation, management and use of cultural heritage. This is based on the idea that heritage can act as an enabler of sustainable development, providing benefits to local inhabitants, and as contributing to social well-being and empowerment, for instance through the formation or recognition of collective identities. But how is this done in practice, particularly within diverse and formerly colonised societies? What is the impact and what are the main challenges of these approaches? To explore this topic, Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya and Gcobani Sipoyo will share their experiences, knowledge and insights of the Zimbabwean and South African contexts respectively. Below you can find the programme, the abstracts of the lectures and the speakers’ biographies. We hope you will join us digitally! 

 

Kind regards,

Ankie Petersen, Ardjuna Candotti, Daan Lavies, Jacomine Hendrikse, Jean-Paul Corten, Maurits van Putten, Remco Vermeulen & Sofia Lovegrove

PROGRAMME

 

19:30     Opening by Sofia Lovegrove



19:35    Giving back: Engaging and empowering communities at heritage sites in Zimbabwe by Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya



20:00    Short Q&A



20:05    Break  



20:15    Community as Heritage in post-colonial imaginary by Gcobani Sipoyo



20:40    Q&A 



21:00    End

ABOUT THE LECTURES



Giving back: Engaging and empowering communities at heritage sites in Zimbabwe by Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya

Zimbabwe is endowed with exceptional cultural and natural heritage sites. Out of these heritage places, Great Zimbabwe has for over a century enticed the attention of tourists, politicians, researchers, local communities, among other groups. This 720ha national monument and world heritage site is surrounded by historical communities that do not only seek to benefit from it, but also to be actively engaged in its management. The National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ), a government department with the statutory mandate of curating the site, has been implementing strategies to provide socio-economic benefits to the host communities. Through the Great Zimbabwe Local Community Representative Committee, the relationship between the monument and local communities continues to improve. NMMZ launched the Great Zimbabwe school fees assistance programme in 2011 and to-date, more than 200 school children from the Nemanwa, Mugabe and Murinye communities have received bursaries. In this talk, Munyaradzi explores NMMZ’s programmes of engaging and empowering local communities around Great Zimbabwe and other heritage sites in the country. The presentation also interrogates these strategies to identify aspects of the engagement that need to be improved.

 

Community as Heritage in post-colonial imaginary by Gcobani Sipoyo

Gcobani’s presentation draws from his own experience and knowledge of working at the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA). His work involves dealing with state issues around cultural heritage, redress and transformation of the national estate, specifically in relation to the built environment. Gcobani’s lecture will focus on community-oriented working practices within the built environment in the context of South Africa. He looks forward to sharing his insights and establishing new contacts towards possible collaborations focused on what has become the most dynamic field of study heavily contested in South Africa.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

 

Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, Ph.D. in Cultural Heritage Management, is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Bindura University of Science Education, Zimbabwe. Prior to his current employment, Munyaradzi was a Curator of Archaeology and Head of the Research and Conservation department (March 2010 – April 2021) at Great Zimbabwe World Heritage Site located in southern Zimbabwe. Due to its importance, size and other historical considerations, Great Zimbabwe is central in the narratives of the past, both during colonial and postcolonial periods. It is an archaeological heritage site that has been used to re-create and to remember certain aspects of the past by different local communities and state governing regimes. Among the wide array of his duties, Munyaradzi was responsible for developing and advising on policy issues relating to the involvement of different publics in the management of Great Zimbabwe and other heritage sites in the country. With special reference to Great Zimbabwe, some of his challenging duties involve partaking in conflict resolution on political, economic, educational and spiritual uses of the site among the wide array of stakeholders that include but are not limited to the state, political parties and politicians, local traditional leaders and their subjects, spirit mediums and educational institutions.

 

Gcobani Sipoyo is a civil servant working for the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA). His  experience comes from working in commercial practice before having moved into the field of cultural heritage. Gcobani’s interests in heritage lie in understanding how the state uses heritage to prescribe values and significance to sites, thereby shaping a common understanding of heritage in a post-apartheid environment. His work concerns cultural landscapes to define and ultimately protect them under the Heritage Resources Act. At SAHRA, Gcobani is exposed to various modes of heritage and he participates in state-led projects with heritage at their core. He is currently following a Master in Philosophy of the Built Environment at the University of Cape Town, where he set out to assess the uses of heritage through the investigation of heritage values in the built environment of Langa, one of South Africa’s oldest townships.

To register please send an email to lezingen@icomos.nl.