Heteroglossic heritage and the first-place of the Kalahari

Abstract

Using Bakhtin’s concept of ‘heteroglossia,’ this article examines the layering and intersections of multiple claims to heritage places that form dialogics about heritage truths. Social groups derive their collective-self, in part, through association with a place, or places, to which they attribute their origin, described here as a ‘first-place.’ Identity maintenance can occur through the praxis of heritage tourism in which group members exhibit emotional performances during their visits to a first-place. Through the extended example of the Tsodilo Hills in Botswana and the various social groups – local ethnic communities, national citizens, and segments of the global community – who each form a collective-self using Tsodilo as a first-place, this article addresses the roles of science (archaeology) and tourism, and their interplay, in enabling several languages or dialects of belonging to coexist without dissonance. The argument is that heteroglossic heritage is possible because visitors’ affect-mediated encounters with heritage places facilitate the reaffirmation of their shared group identity. While all heritage discourse is heteroglossic, the article focuses on claims to a first-place set within a postcolonial context of nation building and modernising that involves the politicisation and re-spatialization of heritage places through tourism development.     

Challenging moral corruption in the postcolony: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s notion of individual responsibility

This article focuses on Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), which portrays a nameless protagonist who clings to his own ethics as he resists corruption in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana in the 1960s, an instance of what Achille Mbembe has called the postcolony. This situation bears comparison with Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, which emphasises individual responsibility in political situations in which common democratic norms no longer apply. Based on Arendt’s insights, I claim that the ethical choices of Armah’s nameless individual suggest a way towards a better communal future. This article further suggests that Arendt’s political philosophy – read in critical dialogue with theorisations of the African postcolony – can offer valuable analytical approaches to discussions of moral decay in postcolonial Africa.