Cultural heritage and the role of traditional intellectuals in Cameroon and Mali

Michael Rowlands is Professor in Material Culture at University College London. His most recent publications have been on representing collective memory in war memorials (in Forty and Kuechler, The Art of Forgetting) and colonial contact and material culture in Cameroon (in Kristiansen ed., Social Transformations in Archaeology). His current research is a comparative study of the social impact of cultural heritage projects in Mali and Cameroon.

In the presentation Gramsci's notion of traditional intellectuals is used, as revived by Fierman in his book Peasant Intellectuals, to consider how the past is used in the contemporary national imaginaries of sections of the elites of Mali and Cameroon. Considering the arguments made about political changes in the 1990s and the influence that a politics of belonging has had in describing the response of elite politics needing to control votes and population movements, a contrast is drawn between the situation in Mali where heritage projects by and large appear to confirm state power and in Cameroon where it is seems to encourage regional politics. The interesting question is why the past is invoked so strongly in line with the experience of cultural fundamentalism elsewhere where notions of heritage are increasingly being used to account for the nature of cultural difference.