| The Pride of Africa |
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| Monday, 01 March 2010 15:03 |
 Largely the brainchild of Themba Wakashe, current director-general of the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC), the African World Heritage Fund (AWHF) is a trailblazing regional fund created to support the development of the World Heritage List in Africa. CLASSICFEEL’s Natalie Watermeyer spoke to Mr Wakashe and Dr Webber Ndoro, the director of the AWHF, about this world first.
‘[This] is the first time within the framework of the World Heritage Convention that regional funding is coming out,’ said Themba Wakashe, director-general of the DAC at the launch of the African World Heritage Fund (AWHF) in May 2006. ‘This has created much excitement within UNESCO and other regions are looking at our example. This is a trailblazing exercise... We (Africa) can do things that are fascinating.’
According to Dr Webber Ndoro, director of the AWHF, the issue of world heritage was brought to the fore by the building of the Aswan dam in Egypt in the 1960s. ‘There were quite a lot of threats to the pyramids and to the Nubian civilisation and … people began to come together and say “well, why don’t we do something, preserve some of these sites from some of the issues which are related to development”,’ explains Dr Ndoro.
‘And this was how the whole issue of creating a convention on protecting the World Heritage Sites came about. So basically this is a prestigious list of those sites which the world feels that they need to share – they’re exceptional, but also they need to benefit everyone’.
To ultimately qualify for the World Heritage List, a site – be it cultural and/or natural – must lay claim to a value or significance that transcends the boundaries of its home country. ‘One of the things which you have to appreciate is the cultural diversity point, particularly when you are dealing with a cultural site; because what may be important to a Hindu, may not necessarily be important to a Christian [and so on],’ says Dr Ndoro. ‘So what we are looking at is… something which goes beyond that religious aspect…which is a big challenge for the World Heritage Committee, because if you can’t understand the culture, you can’t understand the value. The onus is on the State Party to convince others that this value exists. When people talk about “nomination process”, that’s what they’re trying to argue: that this site is not just important to [eg.] Namibia, but that there are these elements that make it valuable across boundaries; also continent-wide and beyond that’.
Read more in the March 2010 issue of CLASSICFEEL magazine
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