Coming to Africa from South America: Sharing experiences on community heritage and the public dissemination of scientific knowledge to foster south-to south dialogues

Abstract

Coming to Africa from South America (geographically and conceptually) is a complex journey with multivariant connotations and implications, related to the region’s variable histories and legacies of colonialism and slavery. From an Argentinean perspective, the relationship with Africa often prioritizes the common humanity origin story at the expense of later cultural developments, while contradicting narratives surround the countries’ self-perception of its role in the slavery trade and emancipation struggles of the 19th Century. In this context, Argentinean African descendants today are a proud and thriving community, reclaiming their space in the national narrative after decades of erasure from official and public narratives and spaces. We are a group of Argentinean archeologists working on a wide range of communitarian projects as well as on the creation of educational content to facilitate the public communication of science. More recently, some of us became involved in the development of a series of public events (a museum exhibition; public film discussions) at the largest national science park in Argentina on pre-colonial African landscapes and history. Preparing for these events highlighted the precarity of our understanding of Africa’s past and present, as the presentation and understanding of the African past in the region is overwhelmingly dominated by paleoanthropological research. This experience enabled us to reflect on commonalities as well as differences in the processes we have been actively involved –from working with small communities and their heritage, to exhibiting non-Western histories at various geographic and temporal scales—in a national context in which the public still refers to 19th century frameworks to assess and incorporate information about past societies. This increasing awareness became more poignant after listening to the call of African scholars and heritage practitioners for a global revision of the practice, dissemination, and education of archaeology as paramount tool for decolonization: the way archaeology is presented and taught worldwide has specific, often toxic, implications affecting African communities’ own engagement with their pasts. Decolonizing is indeed a verb signaling the multiple fronts of battle, and more than ever before, we must be aware of the interconnections as well as the specificities that make each front unique. We will address these issues in our presentation through specific case studies (one on community-led heritage in the Andean sector of NW Argentina, and another one on public dissemination of knowledge about Africa’s past in a national context) and reflect on to what extent the absence of south-to south dialogue is another manifestation of the enduring ‘coloniality of power’ so aptly discussed by Quijano and other scholars. We hope this presentation will be an opportunity for learning and exchanging perspectives on approaches to support communities in developing their own heritage approaches.