Investment, development, and commerce in Africa is nothing new. Egypt is no stranger to international commerce or monumental architecture. They’ve been doing it for over 4,500 years. Procurement of African luxury items sourced from the upper Nile River was integral to the Roman economy 2,000 years ago. The Swahili Coast (present-day Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique) was integral to trade networks that extended to the Middle East, India, and China. Trade caravans between the Mediterranean and the Sahel (portions of today’s Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger) were integral to the rise of European city-states like Venice. Much earlier than that, Bantu-speaking peoples migrated from present-day Cameroon and Nigeria across much of sub-Saharan Africa, bringing agriculture and iron working across a large swath of the continent. All of this happened before Europeans chose mercantilism and colonization as the prevailing politico-economic paradigm.
Africa has long been open for business, which is only accelerating across the continent. A wealth of foreign investment has accompanied expanded commerce in many parts of Africa. As cultural resource management companies seek to increase revenue, I can’t help but wonder why companies are not doing more work in Africa?
CRM Potential in Africa
It is easy to ask why U.S. CRM companies aren’t working in other places around the world. There certainly are strong arguments for doing historic preservation/heritage conservation consulting elsewhere but this blog post focuses on the potential for CRM companies to expand into Africa. Why? Because Africa is growing and where there is growth there’s potential for cultural resource management:
- While 15 percent of all humans live in Africa (1.3 billion people), the continent only generates $3.3 trillion in GDP. But, the continent-wide economy is experiencing 5.16 percent growth. (This compares with the United States, which generates $20.2 trillion in GDP, has 2.3% growth, and has 4.4% of global population; or China, which generates $14.23 trillion in GDP, is experiencing 6.9% growth, and has about 20% of the globe’s population). African countries are currently a small part of the global economy but are growing faster than the U.S. economy, although this growth is very uneven.
- African Union nations hope to boost intra-Africa trade through a free trade agreement. The idea is to increase how much trade African nations generate by trading amongst themselves, which has the potential to create more economic stability across the continent.
- S. companies are trying to strategically invest in African business in hopes of tapping into the projected $2 trillion of consumer spending on the continent by 2025. American CRM companies could follow suit.
- China and other countries are increasing investment in African countries much faster than the United States or European Union countries (surprised?). The United States is starting to play catch-up, however. Our CRM companies can’t afford to miss this bandwagon.
This blog post was inspired by a recent talk by Grant Harris, CEO of Harris Africa Partners, at the U.C. Berkeley. (DISCLOSURE: Grant Harris is a UC Berkeley graduate and I work at Berkeley. Now you can see the connection). Harris is dedicated to expanding the presence of U.S. businesses in Africa and is an independent director of the Africa Finance Corporation, which has directed more than $4 billion in infrastructure investments across the continent. In his talk at Berkeley, Harris discussed the strategic importance of African countries but acknowledged the economic potential of doing business there. In many ways, the quality of life in areas of Africa is improving. While disparities between the rich and poor are extremely stark in Africa, the number of individuals with enough income to make consumer decisions is rapidly expanding. An expanding demographic of African people are beyond the likelihood of falling back into poverty (i.e. middle class). This growing middle class is expanding consumer markets and accelerating the demand for infrastructure investment and construction.
American countries should not only be interested in accessing African markets because of the revenue potential but as part of our country’s overall strategy of maintaining its position in the world. Africa was a major stage for American political activities during the Cold War and the hangover from this period has made the United States a major political player in several parts of the continent; however, this is changing. China leads foreign investment in several African countries with strategic resources like Angola, Mozambique, and Nigeria. This is leading many African nations to shift their political orientation away from the United States, which has major international ramifications. Meanwhile, the United States has not taken advantage of its political leadership in a reciprocal way that could have improved our business status while also helping African countries improve their quality of life.
Harris encourages U.S. businesses to rethink their relationship to African countries. He believes the goal should not be to only to make money from African people but to cultivate win-win relationships that can help African nations improve their economic status and create a larger African middle class while helping the U.S. improve its relationship with African nations. In order to do this, the continent will need a massive investment in infrastructure and companies interested in fruitful collaboration.
Growth and development without adequate heritage conservation
Most African nations have regulations for protecting heritage resources like archaeological sites. As Vincent Négri explains in Cultural Heritage and the Law: Protecting Immovable Heritage in English-Speaking Countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (2008:7—8), current cultural resources laws in Africa are derived from European colonial laws and they;
- Define resource ownership and usage
- The scope and protection afforded to resources
- Regulate archaeological excavation and inadvertent discoveries, and
- Indicate which agencies are tasked with resource protection.
(https://www.iccrom.org/sites/default/files/ICCROM_ICS08_CulturalHeritageandLaw_en_0.pdf)
Joseph Eboreime also states in that same document (2008:3) how projects funded by international entities like the World Bank are charged with conducting an environmental assessment that “…provides a tool for incorporating heritage concerns into economic development.” Basically, internationally funded development in Africa has a heritage conservation nexus strong enough to support cultural resource management.
The guidelines for World Bank-funded environmental assessments read remarkably similar to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which many CRMers in the United States are intimately familiar. The 2006 World Bank Operating Procedures for Physical Cultural Resources charge for borrowers to address affects to cultural resources as part of the required environmental assessment process for any project that;
(a) will involve significant excavations, demolition, movement of earth, flooding or other environmental changes; or
(b) will be located in, or in the vicinity of, a physical cultural resources site recognized by competent authorities of the borrower; or
(c) is designed to support management of physical cultural resources.
Additionally, “If the project has the characteristic set out in (c), it is normally assigned to either Category A or B.”
If the EA identifies potential impacts, the “borrower” (i.e. nation or entity borrowing from the World Bank) must prepare a physical cultural resources management plan that includes:
(a) measures to avoid or mitigate any adverse impacts on physical cultural resources;
(b) provisions for managing chance finds;
(c) any necessary measures for strengthening institutional capacity for the management of physical cultural resources; and
(d) a monitoring system to track the progress of these activities.
These policies also state that consultation is required for mitigating potential impacts and identifying sites, and that the EA must assess the capacity of the “borrower” to implement mitigation measures. (https://policies.worldbank.org/sites/ppf3/PPFDocuments/090224b082301a67.pdf).
While these World Bank requirements are robust and have the potential to yield CRM projects, they do not necessarily pertain to direct foreign investment, which is subject to national preservation laws. This is why any expansion of western-style CRM needs to emphasize capacity building. Countries need to increase the number of professionals capable to execute existing cultural resource laws and constructing additional regulations designed to maximize protection, collaboration, and research potential of each heritage conservation project under their jurisdiction.
African countries do have heritage conservation infrastructure but nothing like the CRM capacity of the United States. Taking care of cultural resources is nothing new to African people but doing western-style CRM is a new addition to traditional conservation strategies. It is likely African countries could actually take the lead in heritage conservation if they were able to combine their unique, ancient cultural conservation traditions to the formalized CRM strategies pioneered in the United States, Australia, and Europe. Imagine conservation strategies that started from the position that heritage properties were the echoes of ancestors. The result could be similar to the diversity of heritage conservation strategies that could have developed among Native American communities had they not been hamstrung into NEPA or NHPA. I’m not saying the extremely diverse cultures and religions in African nations would come to something as holistic as this, but I do believe this is definitely one possibility if African CRMers use existing regulations to build the kind of capacity that serves the plurality of communities in their national boundaries.
Western CRMers struggle with issues of cultural authority, understanding traditional landscapes, and traditional knowledge because most CRMers are coming from a different world view. Many of us don’t understand traditions because they are not “our” traditions. Actually, most of us don’t even live in the counties or cities in which we practice. We don’t have any clue as to how we could best serve communities because we are only there for a 10-day session most of the time. As outsiders, we must seek an invitation to share knowledge produced by traditional people. This is something many indigenous people are not willing to do because they know we’re outsiders. African CRMers may suffer from the same thing but they could ameliorate this by crafting regulations that require the inclusion of local consultants in the CRM process. This could be a way to codify the inclusion of local, indigenous voices in heritage conservation while CRM is in its incipient stages; something we should have done in the United States over 100 years ago.
African countries are diverse and include a wide range of cultures, many with antagonistic relationships; however, the simple fact that they have the chance to create CRM conducted by Africans for Africans immediately increases the potential for producing in-depth, holistic interpretations of heritage resources that cannot be created by an outsider. It is critical that CRMers in Africa and abroad take advantage of the regulatory nexus created by World Bank development projects to build capacity for African nations so they can advocate for resource protection on their own terms. And, that they include local consultants from the very beginning so they can avoid many of the mistakes made in Western CRM.
Ethics needs to be at the core of any CRM expansion in Africa
Selling our services to African countries will become predatory and abusive if countries cross the Atlantic only to make money. Americans have a long history of treating African people and the resources in their countries as if they are the Lego bricks we can use to build our own country. Using African people is how we invented the United States. While no one reading this post today is directly involved in creating the slave trade or Jim Crow, these events are part of our history. Archaeology has been advocating for increasing diversity, protecting heritage, and crafting anti-discriminatory narratives through archaeological research for decades. This motivation needs to be at the heart of any CRM work in Africa.
Helping improve the quality of life for African peoples also needs to be part of CRM on the continent. Right now businesses are investing there; infrastructure projects are happening. Regulations exist but they aren’t always being obeyed largely because African countries do not necessarily have the capacity. This is changing.
Several heritage conservation projects aimed at protecting cultural resources have been conducted in recent years. Perhaps the most prominent is the campaign to save Islamic texts housed in Timbuktu. New York Times bestselling books have been written about how Malian citizens saved these documents in hidden locations when Tuareg rebels overthrew the national government in 2012. Other local heritage conservation efforts include preservation archaeology conducted by Tekle Hagos and other scholars from the University of Addis Ababa at Sib’at, ‘Adwa in Ethiopia as part of an ecotourism project in 2011. Akin Ogundrian’s 2011—2012 work at the Osun Osogbo Grove another example of community based preservation archaeology. The project in Nigeria is particularly exemplary because it is very cognizant of the plant resources that make this ancestral grove a major pilgrimage site for Yoruba people around the world. Ogundrian’s work is very similar to the research used to produce historical and ethnographic contexts for the National Park Service in recent years in that it incorporates more than just buildings and archaeological sites.
The idea of expanding American CRM into Africa is actually not a new idea. Several companies have conducted collaborative compliance projects in various parts of Africa. One example is SRI’s work in Senegal http://www.sricrm.com/projects/senegal.html. This project led to the identification of more archaeological sites on a single project than had been identified in Senegal since the country gained independence in 1960. The project also resulted in funding for future CRM projects and trained over a dozen of graduate students in CRM methods. It also provided employment for dozens of local people as archaeological technicians. I spoke with some of the archaeologists on that project and heard that they were recording artifacts that might have been made by Homo erectus! This is the potential that is possible through these collaborations.
It won’t be easy…
There are massive hurdles to overcome with regard to doing U.S.-style cultural resource management in Africa. Many countries are rapidly developing but the infrastructure we take advantage of in the West is lacking in Africa. There is also a lack of capacity when it comes to archaeologists and heritage conservationists. Fortunately, there is not a lack of will or motivation to protect heritage sites. This can be seen by the heritage conservation regulations in most African nations. It is also exemplified by the organic heritage conservation projects taking place across the continent.
Western CRMers also have to deal with the baggage of what our ancestors did to African peoples. We come from a legacy of colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery. As anthropologists, we also have to confront the fact that our field of inquiry was central to the development and maintenance of white supremacy and racism. Finally, our Western way of life is built upon the exploitation of people in the developing world. I have the computer on which I wrote this blog because children in Africa mined the minerals necessary for this device’s circuitry. Just like the United States was built on the blood and bone of African American slaves and Native American land, it is maintained by wage slaves in the developing the world.
From this perspective, working in Africa is what cultural resource management archaeologists in the United States need if they want to make a significant impact on future generations. We wouldn’t be recording yet another historical can dump; in African countries we’ll probably be recording the first can dump in that whole municipality if not the entire country. Every resource will be completely new, which will force us to reevaluate our methods. Will the same thing we’ve been doing in the United States work in Africa? The people with whom we collaborate will have a head start on CRM. It will be possible for them to avoid some of the mistakes we’ve replicated in the last 50 years, like emphasizing the built environment and archaeological sites at the detriment of ethnographic resources and traditional landscapes. Americans working in Africa will also be forced to confront how our way of life impacts people in other countries. Most importantly, this work will force us to think about how we think about racialized groups, including ourselves. The soul-searching that accompanies this work will undoubtedly reverberate throughout the rest of the industry.
Expanding cultural resource management in Africa is about more than just making money. It might even make us better at our jobs and better for having chosen cultural resource management as a career.
What do you think? Should cultural resource management companies expand into Africa? Write a comment below or send me an email.
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