When Heritage Lives: Towards an evolving understanding of Heritage Authenticity

Masanori Nagaoka, Regional Advisor for Culture at UNESCO’s Regional Office for Eastern Africa, gave some examples, pointing to the former royal palaces of Nyanza in Rwanda. Successive kings built new palaces, while earlier structures made from perishable materials eventually disappeared. Yet the places retained their cultural and spiritual meaning through memory, ritual and community engagement. 

He went on to explain that similar ideas can be seen in the earthen architecture of Tiébélé in Burkina Faso and Djenné in Mali, where the rhythm of the rainy and dry seasons shapes how heritage is maintained. Because mud-brick structures are vulnerable to heavy rain, some are deliberately dismantled before the rainy season and rebuilt during the dry season. Rooted in local cosmology, this cycle of dismantling and rebirth is not seen as a loss of authenticity but as a way of sustaining it—keeping ancestral knowledge, traditional skills and community practices alive from one generation to the next. 

Heritage is local before it is universal

Professor Pascall Taruvinga of Rhodes University brought the discussion back to a fundamental question: who defines heritage? Heritage is first local before it becomes universal, he argued. Communities should therefore be regarded not merely as stakeholders to be consulted, but as custodians and decision-makers.

This approach places elders, spiritual leaders, traditional custodians and other bearers of living knowledge closer to the centre of decisions about what heritage means and how its authenticity should be understood.